Feb
25
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
Whitelists exist because spam filters exist. They are the exception policy, the safety valve. But beyond that simple truism, there are a lot of differences.
Because there's so much spam, filters have to rely on patterns derived from similarities between known spam messages. When a message matches the pattern, the filter notices and does something: reject it, put it in a spam folder, et cetera. Messages that don't match the pattern sail on through.
Similarly, if the message's source -- usually tracked by IP address -- matches the pattern, all messages from that source are noticed by the filter. This could be as specific as a single IP address, or could be a range of IP addresses. When a filter's pattern is broad, it catches a lot of spam. But it may also catch some non-spam messages; this is what's called a "false positive." To avoid those, you could (and probably will) improve the filters over time -- but by the time you find out, the damage is already done. In the meantime, you need a whitelist.
Most mail system administrators will whitelist their own network infrastructure; it's under their control (or under the control of someone nearby), so if any problems come up they can fix them. Also, it's generally a bad idea to block mail from your boss.
Next you'll want to whitelist companies and organizations you and your users frequently interact with. Do a quick mental inventory: how many is that? Did you remember your payroll company, your health insurance benefits broker, your local pizza delivery joint? What about the company your local pizza joint outsourced their email to -- how many other companies do does that company send for? Do they all deserve a free pass around your spam filters?
Pretty soon, managing exceptions to your filters becomes more complicated, more time-consuming, than managing the filters in the first place. And then the phone rings: some company you've never heard of, asking to be whitelisted so they can send their newsletter to a VP you've never even met -- but you've heard she thinks it's easy (and fun) to replace technical staff like you. Or maybe you work for an ISP, and the frat boy on the phone insists that hundreds of your users are just begging for this email. You can't call every single user in the middle of the night to ask if that's true. How do you decide?Tell me more
Categories: Email Deliverability
Feb
22
New York, NY - February 22, 2010 - Return Path, the leading email deliverability and reputation management company, today released its Email Delivery Imperatives guide outlining best practices for email senders in 2010. According to Return Path, email senders should be prepared to:
Categories: Email Deliverability | Press Releases
Feb
03
By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting
The recently released Return Path Deliverability Benchmark report revealed that email deliverability problems plague marketers across the globe. European marketers, with an 85% inbox rate (messages delivered to subscribers' inboxes) are slightly better off than their colleagues in North America who only make it to the inbox 80% of the time. Europeans are a bit worse off than their counter-parts in Asia-Pacific who get delivered 86% of the time.
Here are some key findings from major markets in Europe:
+ In the United Kingdom, 89% of email made to the inbox. France did almost as well with an 88% inbox rate while Germany was in line with the European average at 85%.
+ For email being sent to the "spam" or "bulk" folder, the United Kingdom had the lowest rate at just 3% while Germany had the highest with 11%. France was right in the middle with nearly 5% of email sent to the "junk" or "bulk" folder.
+ A significant percentage of email was categorized as "missing" or not delivered at all. In both the United Kingdom and France 7% of email went missing. Germany did slightly better with just 3% in this category.
The report also looked at non-delivered rates (messages routed to junk/bulk folders or blocked all together) by Internet Service Provider (ISP) in France, Germany and the UK. Inbox placement rates varied significantly from ISP to ISP. In the UK, toughest inboxes to get into were Demon, BT Internet, AOL, Orange, and Yahoo!. In France, it was SFR, AOL, LaPoste, Yahoo!, and Orange and in Germany, it was Web.de, AOL, Yahoo!, Freenet, and GMX.
Categories: Email Deliverability | News | Response
Feb
02
By George Bilbrey
President
Today, Return Path is pleased to present our Global Deliverability Benchmark for the second half of 2009. We conducted this study by monitoring data from our Mailbox Monitor service for email campaigns deployed from July to December 2009. We tracked delivery, blocking and filtering for more than 600,000 campaigns. In addition we reviewed non-delivered data for hundreds of ISPs in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom and the Asia Pacific territories.
Here are some highlights and key findings:
What does this data tell us about the state of email marketing? The answer is clear: deliverability is still a crisis for commercial email senders.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
New York, NY - As commercial email senders increasingly turn to email marketing to help drive sales and attract new customers, problems remain in ensuring that requested emails successfully reach consumer inboxes. In the second half of 2009, 19.9% of commercial, permissioned emails never reached consumers inboxes in the United States and Canada, a slight improvement from January - June 2009 when 20.7% of commercial, permmissioned emails failed to reach consumers inboxes, according to the new Return Path Email Deliverability Benchmark Report. European inbox placement rates fared slightly better with 15% of requested, permissioned emails never reaching consumer inboxes.
Permissioned email reached only 80.1% of consumer inboxes in the United States and Canada during the second half of 2009 (July through December), a .8% increase from the 79.3% inbox placement rate recorded in the first half of 2009. In the United States and Canada, 3.5% of those emails were delivered to a "junk" or "bulk" email folder and 16.3% were missing or not delivered at all - with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery. In Europe, 85.5% of emails reached consumers inboxes, 3.6% of emails were delivered to a "junk" or "bulk" folder, and 11% of emails were missing or not delivered at all. In the Asia Pacific region, inbox placement of permissioned emails was higher in the second half of 2009 with 86.9% of emails reaching the inbox. 10.7% of emails were missing or not delivered and 2.5% of emails were delivered to a "junk" or "bulk" folder.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News | Press Releases
Jan
28
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
SpamAssassin is, by any measure, the most popular open source spam filtering software. It has won numerous awards, and has been incorporated into many commercial filtering appliances. On Tuesday, the SpamAssassin developers announced version 3.3.0, their first major update since 2007.
SpamAssassin was born in 2001, when Justin Mason (who is still involved in the project) rewrote & updated an earlier open-source filtering script. At present it primarily consists of a set of message tests of varying complexity, each analyzing portions of the headers or body and adding to or subtracting from the resulting spam score.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jan
25
Our new episode of Reputation Radio is now available on iTunes.
In this episode, we interview Peter Blair, Security Specialist at Tucows. Blair discusses the biggest misconceptions among marketers about deliverability and how ISPs handle mail. Blair also talks about Tucows' Feedback Loop for email senders, and he discusses the recent debate about ISPs use of engagement metrics as part of email deliverability.
Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? Do you have a question about email deliverability or sender reputation>? Call (320) 52EMAIL (523-6245) and leave a message. Or, email us: podcast@returnpath.net. We might use your question in a future episode.
Listen to episode 14 now and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a minute of Reputation Radio.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Jan
18
By Alex Rubin
Vice President of Business Development
As we gear up for the New Year, it is also a good time to review the highs and lows of the past. By learning what happened in email (cut) and what changed in 2009, we have the opportunity to properly prepare for what is ahead. Last week we released a report on the 10 Top Email Trends of 2009, the complete report is available for download here.
One of the primary things we highlighted about 2009 and expect to see more of in 2010, is the continued growth of spam. Throughout 2009, we saw a flurry of articles publishing metrics on spam volumes rising and the increase of spam as a percentage of all email.
Spammers continue to have access to sophisticated tools to help them send more spam. Let's face it, reports indicate there is a ton of money to be made from being a spammer so they won't to just go away.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jan
15
By George Bilbrey
President
As we told you just before the new year, the Return Path team has been hard at work integrating new data sources into the scoring models that power our Sender Score. The updates are live and in all, we've increased the size of the Sender Score footprint by 25%!
More access to unique IP data means Return Path will be able to calculate Sender Scores for even more IPs. I'm proud to report that there will be very few scenarios where we won't be able to generate a score for an IP.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Jan
13
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
As I mentioned in some recent posts on OnlyOnce, I've really enjoyed sharing the Return Path story with the tech start-up community in New York through groups like the NYC Lean Startup Meetup.
Next week I'm taking the Return Path story on the road to Silicon Valley where I'll be presenting to Startup2Startup. Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of Internet startups. They meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology and entrepreneurship, connect with new people and companies, and share our knowledge and experience.
You'll not only get hear about Return Path's 10 years in business but I'll also be sharing some best practices to diagnose and resolve email deliverability problems.
Interested? Request an invitation here.
Stay tuned for more on this post-event.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
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