A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified) (With apologies to my non-email industry readers for such a long detailed posting) Ah, spring. New life is everywhere. Winter clothes are being put away, birds are returning from their winters in the south, flowers are blooming. We at Return Path are doing our part by announcing the “rebirth” of our Bonded Sender Program, the Internet’s largest and oldest email accreditation program, or whitelist, as Sender Score Certified. Since we acquired Bonded Sender last fall, we’ve had the opportunity to go on a “listening tour” – talking to marketers, publishers, ESPs, ISPs, spam filtering companies, system administrators, email appliance manufacturers – you name it. What we learned was that the…
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Roadrunner
Response to a Deliverability Rant
Response to a Deliverability Rant Justin Foster from WhatCounts, an email service provider based in Seattle, wrote a very lengthy posting about email deliverability on the WhatCounts blog yesterday. There’s some good stuff in it, but there are a couple of things I’d like to clarify from Return Path‘s perspective. Justin’s main point is spot-on. Listening to email service providers talk about deliverability is a little bit like eating fruit salad: there are apples and oranges, and quite frankly pineapples and berries as well. Everyone speaks in a different language. We think the most relevant metric to use from a mailer’s perspective is inbox placement rate. Let’s face it – nothing else matters. Being in a junk mail folder is…
You Heard It Here First, Part II
You Heard It Here First, Part II Tomorrow, Return Path is going to announce that we have acquired the Bonded Sender Program from IronPort Systems (the release is here). As usual, I’m happy to pre-announce M&A activity on my blog in exchange for a moment of self-promotion. Bonded Sender is the industry’s oldest, best known, and most effective whitelist/accreditation program. In a nutshell, it’s a bitch for mailers to qualify for it — they have to demonstrate that they’re a super high quality mailer and get certified by our partner TrustE — but once they do, they have relatively guaranteed safe passage and default images into the inbox at Microsoft (Hotmail and MSN), Roadrunner, and a number of smaller ISPs…
Gmail – I Don’t Get It, Part II
Gmail – I Don’t Get It, Part II Back in June, I blogged about Google’s new Gmail service, how I didn’t understand the fuss, and how its features would ultimately be replicated and true usership stalled at a couple million. I stand by those assertions (just look at what Yahoo, Hotmail, and Lookout have done to the landscape since then), but my company Return Path published some data today that’s interesting on this topic. We run the largest Email Forwarding and Email Change of Address service around, so our data on email switching is pretty solid — we’ve had about 16 million consumers register a change of email with us in total, and about 25,000 new ones come in every…