ReturnPath

Validity Charging for Feedback Loop Emails

History

Return Path was a major driver for the establishment of Feedback Loops (FBLs) back in the mid to late 2000s. They worked with a number of ISPs to help them set up FBLs and managed the signup and validation step for them. In return for providing this service to senders and receivers, they used this data as part of their certification process and their deliverability consulting. Return Path had a strong corporate ethos of improving the overall email ecosystem that originated from the CEO and permeated through the whole organization.

Deliverability, Return Path, List-Unsubscribe Header

Here are a few blog posts covering the email industry from Constant Contact, Return Path, and SpamResource.
Constant Contact posted a blog post about how they measure email deliverability on January 10^th. They started with just tracking bounce backs and using that metric to calculate deliverability but then moved to using seed list through a third-party and report that they get 97% deliverability. Read more at Constant Contact
On January 6^th, Return Path recapped their most read blog posts which includes covering Yahoo’s DMARC Reject Policy, Blacklist Basics, and GMails new FBL and Unsubscribe button. Read more at Return Path
Return Path and SpamResource both have an excellent write-ups about the preference change at Outlook.com/Hotmail regarding the List-Unsubscribe header. Microsoft, like Google, prefers to use mailto instead of http or other URI protocols for the List-Unsubscribe header.

ReturnPath on DMARC+Yahoo

Over at ReturnPath Christine has an excellent non-technical summary of the DMARC+Yahoo situation, along with some solid recommendations for what actions you might take to avoid the operational problems it can cause.

Do Gmail tabs hurt email marketing?

Earlier this year, Gmail rolled out a new way for users to organize their inbox: tabs. Tabs were an attempt by Gmail to help Gmail users organize their mail, particularly programmatically generated email like social media alerts and marketing mail. While many of us took a wait and see approach, a number of email marketers took this as one of the 7 signs of the apocalypse and the end of email marketing as we know it.
Dozens of marketers wrote article with such titles as “7 ways to survive Gmail tabs” and headlines that declared “Thanks to Gmail’s new tabs, promotional e-mails are now shunted off to a secondary inbox. If you rely on e-mail marketing, you should be worried.” Marketers large and small responded by sending emails to recipients begging them to move marketing mail out of the promotions tab and into the inbox.
A number of bloggers, reporters and marketers, myself included, tried to tame the panic. Not because we necessarily supported tabs, but because we really had no insight into how this would affect recipients interacting with email.
This week Return Path published a whitepaper on the effect of Gmail tabs on email marketing (.pdf link).
Not only did Return Path’s research show little negative effect of tabs, they actually saw some positive effects of tabs on how recipients interact with commercial email. Overall, the introduction of tabs in the gmail interface may be a improvement for email marketers.

Return Path releases inbox benchmark study

Earlier this week Return Path released their quarterly inbox placement benchmark study, and the results aren’t good.
According to this data, 22% of opt-in emails are not making it to the inbox. An interesting note is that 25% of email from social networks never makes it to the inbox. This is a challenge for social networks, but I’m not sure many individuals care. For a lot of people, if they don’t get mail from a social network it doesn’t really matter. They’ll either log into the network and get it, or they’re not really engaged with the network. And, when networks try to increase the amount of mail they send, that can turn into a problem as well.
Overall, the failure of mail to get into the inbox is a problem for senders. The underlying issue is that ISPs want to deliver mail the recipient wants. But much of the email out there, including marketing and social network updates, is mail the recipient is fine with getting, and equally fine with not getting.

Return Path partners with Symantec

Today Return Path announced a partnership with Symantec to improve their anti-phishing product. Return Path is incorporating the Symantec Trusted Domain List into their authentication and filtering product to help customers protect their brands. Press Release
Phishing scams affect everyone, and having a brand that is used in phishing can reduce consumer trust in that brand. Protecting brands in email has been one of the more difficult challenges facing the email community. With the adoption of DKIM and DMARC by major brands and ISPs it has become easier to track and address phishing.

Return Path on Content Filtering

Return Path have an interesting post up about content filtering. I like the model of 3 different kinds of filters, in fact it’s one I’ve been using with clients for over 18 months. Spamfiltering isn’t really about one number or one filter result, it’s a complex interaction of lots of different heuristics designed to answer the question: do recipients want this kind of mail?

Delivery and marketing, another view

In addition to posting some of my thoughts about how delivery and marketing have different and possible contradictory constraints, I asked folks on the Only Influencers list what they thought. They had some different perspectives, primarily being marketers. One person even welcomed me to the dark side.
The general response from the marketing side of things appeared to be that ISPs need to stop actually filtering marketing email. That would resolve the problems from the marketers perspective. I don’t necessarily think that will help. I believe if marketers had unfettered access to the inbox, most inboxes would be totally un-useable.
My thinking triggered other folks to consider delivery and marketing and what drives both. George Bilbrey, from Return Path, posted an article in Mediapost looking at why good delivery is an important part of a good marketing strategy.
George points out many marketers really do act as if delivery is separate and detrimental to good marketing.

Return Path speaks about Gmail

Melinda Plemel has a post on the Return Path blog discussing delivery to Gmail.

Holomaxx v. MSFT and Yahoo

I mentioned way back in January that Yahoo had filed a motion to dismiss the case against Holomaxx. Microsoft filed a motion to dismiss around that time, although I didn’t mention it here.
And, of course, Holomaxx filed a motion in opposition in both the Microsoft case and the Yahoo case. Nothing terribly interesting here, about what you’d expect to read.
On March 11 the judge ruled on both motions to dismiss and in both cases ruled that the case was dismissed. He did, however, give leave for the complaints to be amended in the future.
As I expected the Judge agreed that MSFT and Yahoo have protection under the CDA. First, the court made it clear that providers are allowed wide leeway in determining what is objectionable to their customers.

Goodmail alternatives

A number of Goodmail customers are scrambling to identify alternatives now that Goodmail is shutting down. There are two companies in the field offering similar services.
Return Path offers Return Path Certified. A number of large ISPs accept Return Path certification, including Yahoo, Hotmail and Comcast. IP addresses that are certified are not guaranteed to reach the inbox, but there are some delivery benefits to being certified. For instance, Hotmail lifts hourly delivery limits for certified IPs. Return Path closely monitors certified IPs and will remove certification from IP addresses that do not meet their standards. They are offering an expedited application process and managed transition to former Goodmail customers.
SuretyMail offers accreditation to senders. SpamAssassin does use SuretyMail as a factor in their scores. Mail from accredited IPs receives lower SpamAssassin scores. I don’t have much direct experience with SuretyMail, so I can’t talk too knowledgeably about their processes. A former customer has written, however, about their experience with SuretyMail. They are offering a half off application fee for former Goodmail customers.
The other option for senders is to find a good delivery consultant. As I said yesterday, a large number of senders are not certified or accredited and experience 95+% inbox delivery rates. Many of my customers, for instance, see 100% inbox without certification. There are certain market segments where certification makes a difference. But for senders who are sending mail that users actually want to receive and are engaged with, certification isn’t always necessary.

Holomaxx dismisses part of lawsuit

Ken announced yesterday that Holomaxx dropped their suits against Ironport and ReturnPath. Suits against Yahoo and Hotmail are still active.
In the Yahoo case, there is a case management meeting on January 14th.
In the Microsoft case, a response the complaint is due by December 17th.
I’m not quite sure what happened to prompt this change, but I think it makes it even more unlikely that the case will be successful. The courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of ISPs in these kinds of cases.
EDIT: I’d link to Ken’s article, but I appear to have closed that tab and I can’t find it on his website. I’ll add it as soon as I do.
EDIT: Ken’s announcement

Office cat says

All work and no cat petting makes for a very cranky, and in the way, cat.

ESPs being targeted

There has been an ongoing, concerted attack against ESPs recently. Today ReturnPath published some of what is known about the attack.

Reputation monitoring sites

There are a number of sites online that provide public information about reputation of an IP address or domain name.

Delivery Monitor Closing Down

Delivery Monitor by Aweber is one of the inbox monitoring services available for senders. Aweber has been in the process of winding down Delivery Monitor for the last few months and they will be turning the service off completely tomorrow.
A lot of folks have asked me about replacements for Delivery Monitor. There are, of course, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity, but many of the smaller mailers I talk to can’t justify the expenditure for either service.
Enter Green Arrow Monitor, a service provided by Green Arrow. This is a new seed list service aimed at marketers that need some delivery monitoring at commercial US ISPs. They’re reaching for the middle of the market. As a bonus, they’re offering special pricing for former Delivery Monitor customers.
While they don’t offer all the bells and whistles of other seedbox services, for the small to mid-size company that wants to know what their delivery is like at the major commercial ISPs this is a worthwhile service to investigate.
Full disclosure – I worked with GreenArrow to look at what parts of the market were being missed by other monitoring services and provide delivery consulting for some of their customers.

Yahoo turns on images by default for RP certified IPs

ReturnPath announced today that images and links from Return Path Certified senders are turned on by default in the Yahoo mail interface. This affects many of the other domains using Yahoo for mail hosting including Bellsouth, SBC, Rogers, BT Internet and Rocketmail.
Overall, I think this is something that Return Path can be proud of. Yahoo fiercely protects their users’ inboxes. They have even gone so far as to cancel contracts with certification companies when the level of certified clients was not to their standards. I have no doubt that this decision was made by looking at the quality of customers that Return Path are certifying and deciding that the certification is a meaningful and useful measure of the mail.
This speaks to the time and effort Return Path commits to both the initial certification process and the ongoing monitoring and compliance processes.

RPost and Goodmail settle lawsuit

Last September, I blogged about RPost suing Goodmail for patent infringement. Today the two companies announced they’ve reached a settlement and have forged a partnership. Goodmail will be offering RPost’s technology as an upgrade to customers and replacing their own “proof of delivery” technology with RPost’s legal service technology.

News from MAAWG

During MAAWG a number of companies in the email space announce new initiatives, mergers, products and the like. This MAAWG is no different.
Spammers adjust to security trends. This is not really news, spammers have been adjusting to new security measures since folks started blocking from: addresses back in ’95 and ’96. The tactics are different and developing, but for every security hole that is blocked, spammers will search for another hole to exploit. The unfortunate truth is that end user is the weak point, and spammers and scammers are very very good at social engineering.
Spam statistics stalemate. Spam is still accounting for approximately 90% of all email traffic.
Cloudmark acquires Bizanga. I talked to some of the Cloudmark folks and they seem very excited with their acquisition of the Bizanga MTA and email technology.
Bizanga Storage announced. Bizanga Store is a scalable storage system brought to you by some of the people who were instrumental in building the Bizanga MTA acquired by Cloudmark.
ReturnPath announced partnership with RPost. Yet more ongoing changes in the certification field.

20% of email doesn't make it to the inbox

Return Path released their global delivery report for the second half of 2009. To put together the report, they look at mail delivery to the Mailbox Monitor accounts at 131 different ISPs for 600,000+ sends. In the US, 20% of the email sent by Mailbox Monitor customers to Return Path seed accounts doesn’t make it to the inbox. In fact, 16% of the email just disappears.
I’ve blogged in the past about previous Return Path deliverability studies. The recommendations and comments in those previous posts still apply. Senders must pay attention to engagement, permission, complaints and other policy issues. But none of those things really explain why email is missing.
Why is so much mail disappearing? It doesn’t match with the philosophy of the ISPs. Most ISPs do their best to deliver email that they accept and I don’t really expect that ISPs are starting to hard block so many Return Path customers in the middle of a send. The real clue came looking at the Yahoo numbers. Yahoo is one of those ISPs that does not delete mail they have accepted, but does slow down senders. Other ISPs are following Yahoo’s lead and using temporary failures as a way to regulate and limit email sent by senders with poor to inadequate reputations. They aren’t blocking the senders outright, but they are issuing lots of 4xx “come back later” messages.
What is supposed to happen when an ISP issues a 4xx message during the SMTP transaction is that email should be queued and retried. Modern bulk MTAs (MessageSystems, Port25, Strongmail) allow senders to fine tune bounce handling, and designate how many times an email is retried, even allowing no retries on a temporary failure.
What if the missing mail is a result of senders aggressively handling 4xx messages? Some of the companies I’ve consulted for delete email addresses from mailing lists after 2 or 3 4xx responses. Other companies only retry for 12 – 24 hours and then the email is treated as hard bounced.
Return Path is reporting this as a delivery failure, and the tone of discussion I’m seeing seems to be blaming ISPs for overly aggressive spamfiltering. I don’t really think it’s entirely an ISP problem, though. I think it is indicative of poor practices on the part of senders. Not just the obvious permission and engagement issues that many senders deal with, but also poor policy on handling bounces. Perhaps the policy is fine, but the implementation doesn’t reflect the stated policy. Maybe they’re relying on defaults from their MTA vendor.
In any case, this is yet another example of how senders are in control of their delivery problems. Better bounce handling for temporary failures would lower the amount of email that never makes it to the ISP. This isn’t sufficient for 100% inbox placement, but if the email is never handed off to the ISP it is impossible for that email to make it to the inbox.

Delivery case study

Mailchimp published a case study looking at a customer moving from sending in house to using Mailchimp.

Matt Blumberg joins the DMA Board

Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, announced on his blog today that he has joined the board of the DMA. The blog post is both an explanation of why he did it and an agenda for what he wants to accomplish.

Technology does not trump policy when it comes to delivery

Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is.
Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article, pointing out that the vast majority of things affecting delivery are under the control of the list owner, not under the control of the ESP. As they are both right, I clearly agree with them. I’ve also posted about reputation and delivery regularly.

E-Postage Just Won't Die

E-Postage is back! Wired covers a report from New Scientist. Here’s what they have to say: “Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing e-mails, with proceeds going to charity, in a bid to cut down on spam. Can doing good really do away with spam, which consumes 33 terawatt hours of electricity every year, not to mention way too much of our time?”
Alex Rubin at Return Path says hold up, wait a minute. He writes: “Our contacts at Yahoo! tell us this idea is purely in the research realm, and is not scheduled for development in Yahoo! Mail. In other words: it isn’t even vaporware and isn’t likely to be a part of the Yahoo! mail system anytime soon.” He goes on to say (I’m paraphrasing) that oops, Yahoo didn’t really intend for this research to become public.
So, apparently, there are no plans for Yahoo to roll out E-Postage today, tomorrow or next week. Nothing to see here, beyond a simple web site and some thoughts from a Yahoo researcher. Some individual’s hopeful vision for the future, not a corporate announcement of an upcoming product.
E-Postage has always been a neat idea, I’ve thought. A neat idea beset by insurmountable problems. First, end users don’t want to pay for the email messages they send, they want all you can eat. With years of webmail providers offering free email access, you’ll have a heck of a time convincing somebody’s grandmother that they have to pony up a nickel to be able to email the grandkids.
Then, answer me this: Who’s going to handle the economics on the back-end? And any time you have a computer storing a resource (like, say, account information for that tiny little bit of money you’ll need to be able to send me an email), that information can be hacked, exploited, stolen. You think spammers are actually going to pony up? Why would they? They’ll just hack into millions of exploitable computers, stealing five cents from everyone along the way, and gleefully shoveling millions of spams into millions of inboxes.
This concept of E-Postage, either paying money to send email, or spending “computational power” to send email, has been kicking around for years. Periodically, some researcher comes up with the idea anew, and suggests that we all immediately adopt their sure fire plan to solve the world’s spam problem, immediately, pennies at a time. These ideas never seem to go anywhere. And that will never change until somebody can actually convince most of the world to adopt their proposed scheme. Will it ever happen? Never say never, but I have no plans to rush out and buy e-Stamps any time soon.
— Al Iverson

Failed delivery of permission based email

A few weeks ago, ReturnPath published a study showing that 20% of permission based email was blocked. I previously discussed the definition of permission based email and that not all the mail described as permission based is actually sent with the permission of the recipient. However, I only consider this a small fraction of the mail RP is measuring, somewhere in the 3 – 5% range. What happens with the other 17 – 15% of that mail? Why is it being blocked?
There are 3 primary things I see that cause asked for and wanted email to be blocked.

Permission Based Emails? Are you sure?

Yesterday I wrote about the ReturnPath study showing 21% of permission based email does not make it to the inbox. There are a number of reasons I can think of for this result, but I think one of the major ones is that not all the mail they are monitoring is permission based. I have no doubt that all of the RP customers say that the mail they’re sending is permission based, I also have no doubt that not all of the mail is.
Everyone who sends mail sends permission based email. Really! Just ask them!
In 10 years of professionally working with senders I have yet to find a marketer that says anything other than all their email is permission based. Every email marketer, from those who buy email addresses to those who do fully confirmed verified opt-in with a cherry on top will claim all their email is permission based. And some of the mailers I’ve worked with in the past have been listed on ROKSO. None of these mailers will ever admit that they are not sending permission based email.
Going back to ReturnPath’s data we don’t really know what permission based email means in this context and so we don’t know if the mail is legitimately or illegitimately blocked. My guess is that some significant percentage of the 20% of email to the probe accounts that doesn’t make it to the inbox is missing because the sender does not have clear recipient permission.
When even spammers describe their email as permission based email marketing, what value does the term have?

Delivery Metrics

Last week ReturnPath published a study that shows 20% of permission based email fails to be delivered to the inbox. For this study, ReturnPath looked at the mail sent by their mailbox monitor customers and counted the number of deliveries to the inbox, the number of deliveries to the bulk folder and the number of emails that were not delivered.
At US ISPs 21% of the permission based emails sent to the ReturnPath probe network did not make it to the inbox. 3% of the emails sent went to the bulk folder and 17% did not make it to the mailbox at all. MSN/Hotmail and Gmail were the worst ISPs to get mail to. They each failed to deliver more than 20% of the mail that was sent to them. At Canadian ISPs, even less of the mail made it to the inbox, primarily because primus.ca is such a large portion of the Canadian market and they use Postini as a filter. Postini is a quite aggressive filter and takes no feedback from senders.
ReturnPath’s take home message on the survey is that one set of metrics is not enough to effectively evaluate a marketing program. Senders need to know more about their mailings than they can discover from just the bounce rate or the revenue rate or response rate or open rate.
There are a lot of reasons an email doesn’t get to the recipient’s inbox or bulk folder. Mail can be hard blocked at the MTA, and rejected by the ISP outright. Mail can be soft blocked at the MTA and the ISP can slow down sending. Sometimes this is enough to cause the sending MTA to stop attempting to deliver the mail, thus causing mail to not show up. Both of these types of blocks are usually visible when looking at the bounce rate.
Some ISPs accept mail but then fail to deliver it to the recipient. Everything on the sender end says the ISP accepted it for delivery but the ISP just drops it on the floor. This is the type of block that a mailbox monitoring program is best able to identify.
Despite all the discussions of numbers, many marketers are still not measuring the variables in their email campaigns. Ken Magill wrote today about a study released by eROI that indicates more than a third of marketers are not doing any testing on their mailings.
Now, both of these studies are done in an attempt to sell products, however, the numbers discussed should be making smart senders think about what they are measuring in regards to their email campaign, how they are measuring those factors and what the measurements mean.

Modifying RP managed FBLs

I was recently pointed out the FBL support pages for those feedback loops hosted by ReturnPath. Clicking around, they have the framework and the beginnings of a good source of information for their services. You can also open support tickets for questions and services that are not covered in their knowledge base.

ReturnPath customers?

Someone posted the following question about ReturnPath in the comments:

Email news

ReturnPath sold its email change of address division to Fresh Address and spun off its email marketing division. Full announcement at the RP Blog and a copy of the press release at EmailKarma.
e360 petitioned the court earlier this week to compel Spamhaus to expand on their answers to e360’s interrogatories. Today the court denied the motion. Text of the motion at Mickey’s place.
There has been a noticeable increase in registrar phishing over the last week. This may be related to ICANN de-accrediting ESTHosts, a registrar well known in the anti-spam community for registering domains used in phising and spam. UPDATE from ICANN.

Interview with Matt Blumberg

Mark Brownlow posted an interview with Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, about the merger with Habeas. It is well worth a read.
I have not yet commented on the merger and how this is going to affect the delivery industry because I am not sure how it will. Some of the effect is dependent on what ReturnPath does with the two companies and how their policies change. Here at Word to the Wise, we have known the folks at both companies for a very long time.
One thing that strikes me about this merger is that it means there are few direct competitors left in the delivery market. Everyone currently in the whitelist / delivery certification market seems to have a slightly different target audience and slightly different business model.
ReturnPath has SenderScore Certified and the Safelist. To get on these lists senders must meet criteria that, while filtered through ReturnPath, are set by the ISPs. Many senders find that they can get consistently high inbox delivery just by meeting the ISP standards, even if they are not SenderScore Certified or on the Safelist. However, certification does provide senders with an assurance that they are meeting standards.
Goodmail has their CertifiedEmail product. While certified senders must also meet criteria, they are also paying ISPs for delivery. I have always seen the Goodmail product as more focused on and more valuable for transactional senders rather than other senders. This slightly overlaps with ReturnPath’s target market, but the senders in this market do have different needs pressures.
ISIPP has their SuretyMail product. This provides a framework for senders to make statements about the email they send in a way that receivers can reliably query. This is a slightly different approach, in that ISIPP does not classify mail for their customers, but allows customers to self-classify. The benefit of ISIPP is that the ISIPP framework is trusted by their receiver-users and can push back on ISIPP if customers incorrectly self-classify.
Different markets, different business models, different approaches.

ReturnPath acquires Habeas

This morning ReturnPath announced they had acquired Habeas.
Goodbye Habeas.
What have you left? Just footprints
in snow as spring comes.