End of an era

A few weeks ago, Return Path announced they were being purchased by Validity, who also own BrightVerify. Last week, they had a round of layoffs. According to sources inside the industry, Validity is closing the New York headquarters and Indianapolis offices and layoffs involved more than 170 staff members.


picture of a dictionary page with the word "trust" highlighted

Return Path has been a fixture in the deliverability space for years. While they didn’t invent email certification, they were the only VC backed company that survived. Their suite of tools was the only major player in the market for quite a while. All of this contributed to creating the deliverability industry as we know it today.

But as I’ve been writing about for a while, things are really changing in delivery. How mail is filtered is significantly different now than it was a few years ago. The changes at Return Path, including some of the positions eliminated during the layoffs, tell me that the new owners see those changes as well.

Over the years Return Path has effectively addressed current deliverability challenges. When deliverability was mostly about IP address reputation and global inbox decisions, they created probe accounts and developed their certification program. As filters changed, they introduced panel data and improved their certification requirements. I attribute much of their success to the company leadership and their focus on supporting the same goals as the ISPs – to get email to the people who want it and minimise the amount of unwanted email.

The purchase announcement from Validity makes me wonder how much of that will continue over the next few years. Part of the reason Return Path has been so successful over the years is their focus on permission and good email marketing practices. I don’t see much of that focus in the Validity announcement. In fact, looking at the products Validity are selling they seem to be building a suite of tools designed to minimise the bad effects of acquiring addresses through channels other than direct opt-ins from recipients.

Will Return Path continue on the path its been on for the last 2 decades or will this change under their new owners? Only time will tell.

Related Posts

The inbox is a moving target

The more I look at the industry, the more convinced I am that we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how email is filtered. This shift will change how we handle email deliverability and what tools we have and what information we can use as senders to address challenges to getting to the inbox.

Read More

Gmail, machine learning, filters

I’m sure by now readers have seen the article from Gmail “Spam does not bring us joy — ridding Gmail of 100 million more spam messages with TensorFlow.” If you haven’t seen it, go read it. It’s not often companies write about their filtering philosophy and what tools they’re using to manage incoming bad mail.

Read More

Email filters and small sends

Have you heard about the Baader-Meinhoff effect?

The Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency illusion, is the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Baader–Meinhof effect at Wikipedia

There has to be an corollary for email. For instance, over the last week or so I’ve gotten an influx of questions about how to fix delivery for one to one email. Some have been from clients “Oh, while we’re at it… this happened.” Others have been from groups I’m associated with “I sent this message and it ended up in spam.”

Read More