OtherInbox is a service that allows subscribers to create tagged email addresses and organize incoming mail. Acquiring OIB gives Return Path access to recipient behaviour that only the ISPs had previously.

According to the press release, Return Path will be using engagement data from OIB as another factor for Return Path Certification. I think this can only improve the scoring and reflect a more modern measure of wanted mail.

Congratulations to Return Path and OtherInbox.

“Being blacklisted most likely suggests that sender IP either sends out to a great deal of unknown or angry recipients.” That’s not how most blocklists work. Most blocklists are driven by spam traps or by the personal mailboxes of the list maintainers. The only blocklist that took requests from the public was the old MAPS RBL, and I don’t believe that is the case any longer.

Blocking at ISPs is often a sign of sending out a lot of mail to unknown or angry / unengaged recipients. But most ISPs don’t make their lists public. Some allow anyone to look up IP addresses, and if we had the IPs we could check. But we don’t, so we can’t.

“[...] if you share this IP with Phones4U then only 62% of your emails will be accepted by a recipient’s email server. That’s before they hit the junk filter. I wouldn’t want to pay for that.” This conclusion relies on the Sender Score “accepted rate” number. Accepted Rate is a figure I don’t rely on for much. I’ve never been able to reconcile this number with what client logs tell me about accepted rate. For instance, I have one IP address that has a 4.4% acceptance rate. But I know that 19 out of 20 emails from this IP do not bounce. In fact, it’s rare to see any mail from this IP bounce.

The one thing that Mr. Geake gets right, in all of this, is that if you’re on a shared IP address with a poor sender, then you share that sender’s reputation. Their reputation can hurt your delivery.

But a dedicated IP isn’t always your best bet, either.  Smaller senders may not have the volume or frequency required to develop and keep a good reputation on an static IP. In these cases, sharing an IP address with similar senders may actually increase delivery.

For some senders outsourcing the email expertise is a better use of resources than dedicating a person to managing email delivery. For other senders, bringing mail in house and investing in staff to manage email marketing is better.

Tomorrow: how do you really evaluate an ESP?

Research: ESPs might get you blacklisted.

That article is full of FUD, and the author quite clearly doesn’t understand what the data he is relying on means. He also doesn’t provide us with enough information that we can repeat what he did.

But I think his take on the publicly available data is common. There are a lot of people who don’t quite understand what the public data means or how it is collected. We can use his post as a starting off point for understanding what publicly available data tells us.

The author chooses 7 different commercial mailers as his examples. He claims the data on these senders will let us evaluate ESPs, but these aren’t ESPs. At best they’re ESP customers, but we don’t know that for sure. He claims that shared IPs means shared reputation, which is true. But he doesn’t claim that these are shared IPs. In fact, I would bet my own reputation on Pizza Hut having dedicated IP addresses.

The author chooses 4 different publicly available reputation services to check the “marketing emails” against. I am assuming he means he checked the sending IP addresses because none of these services let you check emails.

He then claims these 4 measures

give a representation of how an ESP operates.

[...]

This includes whether it follows best principles and sends authenticated emails, unsubscribes Feed Back loop (FBL) complaints etc.

Well, no, not even a little bit.

The 4 measures he included are SenderScore, Sender Base, Trusted Source and MxToolbox’s blacklist checker. The first 4 are proprietary scores generated by commercial companies. Sender Base is a proprietary reputation scheme stream run by Cisco/Ironport. Trusted Source is a proprietary reputation evaluation run by McAfee.

In all cases, the scores are proprietary and are closely guarded secrets and we don’t know much about how they are generated. There are a few things I’m comfortable saying about them.

Scores reflect information provided by receiving mail servers. These scores are sometimes, but not always, applicable to receivers that use a different filtering system. Likewise, good senders can have poor scores and poor senders can have good scores.

In many of the scores volume plays an important role. Volume changes, whether up or down can cause unexpected and transient changes in scores.

Publicly available reputation scores don’t actually tell you that much about the policies of an ESP or the deliverability at a certain ESP.  Content is playing a bigger and bigger role in filtering at major ISPs, and good IP reputation scores aren’t sufficient to overcome bad content.

The only thing that actually tells you about delivery rates is: actually looking at your delivery rates.

The other source the author relied on to analyze deliverability is a scan of 100+ blocklists. He points out that some “ESPs” are listed and blocked by those blocklists. He never mentions which ESPs are listed, or which blocklists are listing them. There are a lot of published blocklists that are not very widely used, and many senders, ESP and otherwise, don’t notice or care. The time and energy to get delisted does nothing to improve delivery. So they just ignore it.

As we’ve demonstrated here recently, even listings on widely used lists are not sufficient to demonstrate poor practices on the part of the sender. Sometimes the blocklists are wrong.

So the author wrote an entire blog post about analyzing deliverability, without actually analyzing deliverability.

And, when he reported the results of his analysis, he left out all the relevant information that would allow us to repeat his analysis. We can’t look at the IP addresses (or the ESPs) that he used as samples because he reported neither bit of information. We can’t look at the blocklists that these IP addresses (or the ESPs) are listed on because he didn’t report the blocklists.

His delivery analysis is full of problems. Tomorrow we’ll look at the errant conclusions he drew from his “analysis.”

The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how their mail is accidentally blocked by ISPs and businesses.

Many legitimate businesses like emedia are finding that strict spam filters are causing some of our emails to be miss-classified as junk email even though you opted-in to subscribe to our free service.

For information and support to guarantee your ebulletins are delivered click here

I admit it, I have some bias against companies that spend time and energy pointing out how ISPs are being mean and blocking their mail. Yes, ISPs do screw up and occasionally block mail that probably shouldn’t be blocked. But, in my experience, senders who spend a lot of time focused on the blocks are usually not following best practices.

This company is not only sending mail to people who have no idea who they are and don’t remember subscribing, but they’re also violating CAN SPAM. The mail I was forwarded did not contain an opt-out link. I suppose technically it is a transactional message, but if the mail isn’t being delivered what’s the harm in putting in an opt-out link?

emedia also claims to be “an active member of Return Path’s Sender Score Certified program, the leading third party email certification program.” The IP this email came from isn’t certified and has what I consider to be a low Sender Score. Maybe this is an attempt to clean up to stay certified, that’s possible.

One thing that makes me very, very suspicious of this sender is that to sign up for the mail you need to create an account and provide a password. I have this horrible suspicion that were my friend to try and opt-out, they wouldn’t let her do it until she provided a password. This is a clear CAN SPAM violation.

Nonsense like this drives me totally batty. Their webpage looks like hundreds of other marketing webpages out there. They talk a good game. But they’re sending spam and seem to think the problem is “overly strict spam filters” rather than the fact that people they’re mailing never asked to receive their mail.

I interact with a lot of online marketers and I have a huge amount of respect for many of them. I know how difficult it can be to run a good email marketing program and that sometimes it feels like ISPs are a sender’s worst nightmare. Then I look at marketers like this and I understand why ISPs block so much “legitimate” mail. Even if most of the emediaUSA list is opt-in, some portion of it isn’t and I think it’s totally fair game to block all mail from that source.

There are so many esoteric discussions going on where people argue about frequency, list hygiene, data management, and permission. All of those are just ignoring the fact that there are a lot of marketers sending mail the recipients never opted-in to receive. Botnets might be a problem for the ISPs, just in the total volume of mail that hits their mail servers. But for the average person, it’s that non-botnet “legitimate company” spam in their inbox that is the most visible spam problem.

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.

Does anyone have any reports or links as to whether Return Path are worth the thousands p.a that they charge?

I don’t have any reports or links handy. Anyone have any?

Also, what about competing services like Goodmail and PivotalVeracity?

Have a great weekend all.

Yahoo! offers a Complaint Feedback Loop service, free of charge, via this site operated by Return Path. To begin the process:

1. Determine your sending domain (the d= value in your DomainKeys or DKIM signature).
2. Determine your selector (the s= value in your DomainKeys or DKIM signature).
3. Create a dedicated email address to receive complaints, capable of handling a large volume of reports in the standard Abuse Reporting Format.

Additionally, Yahoo is now incorporating ReturnPath’s Sender Score Certified into their spam filtering process.

UPDATE: Those with existing Yahoo FBLs do not need to reapply, the current FBLs will continue as before. However, if you have an existing FBL and want to make changes to it, you will need to do the following:

If you had registered and activated domains during the beta phase of our Complaint Feedback Loop program last year and wish to manage these domains, we encourage you to create an account at:

http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/

After creating and verifying your account via the online process, please complete our request form so we can link your account to your company’s existing record. The form can be found at:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/cfl_app.html

Once your account is linked, you will be able to make changes to your domains.

Note: When creating your account, please provide your corporate email address during the registration process.