Tag Archives: deliverability

Email deliverability rates dropped in second half 2011, says Return Path

  By Remy | March 21, 2012 - 08:00 | Deliverability, Spam
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If you’re having some deliverability issues, you are probably not alone. Email deliverability rate has dropped in the second half of 2011 according to Return Path. Calling it inbox placement rate, the percentage of IPR has dropped from an average of 80% (one in five has gone missing) to an average of 76,5% globally. This means almost one in four emails that has been sent has not been reported as delivered.

One of the key reasons of the dropping deliverability rates has been the fact that ISPs are putting more weight behind reputation metrics and enforcing strict rules.

Here’s a chart with all the global regions and their respective deliverability rates:

It shows that inbox placement rates are highest in North America and Europe, Middle East and Africa while Asia Pacific and Central & Latin America sees the lowest inbox placement rates.

With general email spam dropping a lot lately (from 300 billion to 30 billion daily), it seems that crowded inboxes due to commercial/spam messages are becoming a thing of the past. Have ISPs and webmail providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo tightened their spam filters too much?

Have you seen a decline in your delivery rate? More people asking where the newsletter is you normally send? Or as an end user of for instance Gmail or Hotmail, have you noticed more messages ending up in the spam folder, even when they weren’t spam?

It seems too much of a coincidence (I don’t believe in coincidence, but in this case…) that Gmail has posted an article on their official blog detailing the reasons why messages have ended up in your spam folder.

Just over a month ago, Gmail has tightened their spam filters, with quite some messages not reaching the inbox anymore as a result, another post on Return Path’s blog tells.

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DMARC launched: standardizes email authentication

  By Remy | February 1, 2012 - 09:00 | Deliverability
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The DMARC.org (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) website launched two days ago with an official press release stating that fifteen of the biggest email and technology providers have teamed up to combat the threat of deceptive email through standardization of email authentication. This includes the correct use of SPF records and DKIM.

A quote from the press release:

The DMARC specification addresses concerns that have traditionally hindered widespread deployment of an authenticated, trusted email ecosystem. Today, email receivers lack a reliable way to know the extent to which an email sender uses standards like SPF and DKIM for authenticating their messages. As a result, providers must rely on complex and imperfect measurements to separate legitimate unauthenticated messages sent by the domain owner from fraudulent phishing messages sent by a scammer.

Which companies are involved?

All of the big webmail providers are involved: AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (they together account for about 1,5 billion email addresses), financial institutions and service providers (Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, PayPal), social media properties (American Greetings, Facebook, LinkedIn) and email security solutions providers (Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, Trusted Domain Project).

(more…)

Email insight: how to lose your spam tag

  By Remy | August 8, 2011 - 14:30 | Email Marketing Insight
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As soon as my girlfriend tells people what I do for a living, people start saying ‘oh he’s a spammer’ or ‘he’s one of those call center guys’. Not funny. At first she would say ‘something with computers’ but I’ve tought her I’m in email marketing. So she tells those people that ask nowadays that I am in email marketing. After that she gets those aforementioned responses.

I’m probably not the only one getting that, but it’s understandable, up to a point. When you combine the words email and marketing, thinking of spam is not totally illogical. After all, until late last year spam was hovering anywhere between 100 and 200 billion messages per day. Some days that was anywhere between 90% and 95% of total email traffic worldwide. Only since February it has dropped to about 30 to 40 billion messages per day. Still a lot, but a lot less thankfully.

Even so there are quite some people who don’t understand what to good guys are doing: delivering the newsletters and email offers they want to their inboxes. I emphasized the ‘they want’ there, because even when people have signed up for something, if they don’t want it they would consider it spam. Don’t forget to read Insights into Social Break-up report by ExactTarget and Email insight: future of email part 2 – Relevancy on that.

What it all boils down to is education. Not knowing the insides of a certain industry makes people quite ignorant. The same goes for online security (see great example in an XKCD comic here) and other more specialized industries. Time to make the general public a bit more email marketing savvy, right?

The way to educate the people without boring them with the tech or nerdy stuff comes down to telling stories and giving simple examples. Daily challenges being put in a little story can tell a lot about your job, especially when you’re in the specialized industry that email marketing is. Storytelling makes it stick with them, and they will remember what you do instead of thinking ‘it’s that spam guy!’. Now go forth and educate.

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Email news: blocklists, Spamhaus, email marketing census and permission

  By Remy | March 9, 2011 - 09:00 | Email Marketing News
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This weeks email news is mostly centered around blocklists/spam, permission, open rates and the state of the email marketing industry including permission.

Starting with the technical side of email marketing, here’s a Mailchimp blog post called How blocklist operators think: it notes the crazy and challenging stuff going on in deliverability land.

Following that, the next bit of news comes from Germany having a secure way to deal with spam. Might sound to good to be true, maybe it is, maybe it will work. A quote:

De-mail — a play on the country-code abbreviation for Deutschland (Germany) and the word e-mail — is a government-backed service in which all messages will be encrypted and digitally signed so they cannot be intercepted or modified in transit. Businesses and individuals wanting to send or receive De-mail messages will have to prove their real-world identity and associate that with a new De-mail address from a government-approved service provider. The service will be enabled by a new law that the government expects will be in force by the end of this month. It will allow service providers to charge for sending messages if they wish.

Eliminating spam is not the primary purpose of De-mail — in fact, service providers will be legally obliged to deliver every De-mail message, without blocking any, just as the postal service is not supposed to throw away your mail.

Read the full story here.

Staying with the spamverse, the one year anniversary of the DBL (Domain Block List) brings a new zone by Spamhaus. The post notes about the way the Domain Block List works, and like Ben Chestnut mentioned in the earlier MailChimp blog post new challenges have been coming and going, but the battle could one day be fought, because…

Lastly about spam: Symantec notes the state of the global spam volume. After a dip late December 2010 / early 2011, spam has been on the rise, but nowhere near the volume of last year. See the post and graphic below, comparing February 2010 to 2011. That’s a drop 80 billion emails you see there in 12 months. Written in full for significance: 80.000.000.000 emails less.
http://www.symantec.com/connect/ja/blogs/update-global-spam-volume

In other email marketing news:

Email marketing Census 2011 by eConsultancy: see a sample of the report here

Ken Magill newsletter: Crappy food, jail threat could lift opens: read it here

Another Ken Magill item: Ask an Expert: How to Evangelize Permission: read it here

Lastly, the future of email is discussed, including Google and Microsoft employees shedding light on webmail, and that it’s not a money maker for them: read it here

Return Path launches Domain Assurance, an anti-phishing service

  By Remy | February 23, 2011 - 15:00 | Deliverability, Spam
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The email deliverability company Return Path has announced a new service called Domain Assurance which should help companies to aid in battling phishing. Big names in the internet industry are already backing the new service: those include Google, Yahoo!, Tucows and Cloudmark. The way this new service will work is described below:

Domain Assurance helps protect companies from being spoofed and phished by blocking fraudulent emails before they reach the consumer’s inbox.

With Domain Assurance, email senders first have their domains audited to be sure they are properly authenticated. Email authentication methods like SPF and DKIM are industry-accepted standards that confirm the identity of the sender of the email. In the Domain Assurance Dashboard, email senders can review authentication results from Return Path’s mailbox provider partners and the proprietary ISP-based Return Path Reputation Network. Senders can readily detect any malicious activity and initiate a proactive course of action to mitigate any damage.

Additionally, senders can validate email authentication results across all the email sent under their domains, including transactional, marketing, and corporate.

Once the sender has ensured that all their email is being authenticated, they can add their domains and sub-domains to the Domain Assurance Registry list for ISPs to automatically reject all mail coming from these registered domains that fail authentication. Email senders using Domain Assurance have access to rich data reports about their email, get alerted when fraudulent emails using their domains are observed, and are provided with email intelligence on attackers and phishing URLs so they can initiate the take down of fraudulent websites.

As I understand this service, it will not be for every company but more for high volume, high profile companies that are at the crossroads of sending a lot of emails themselves, but also having their brand or product name abused by people who are creating phishing messages. To mitigate the effect of phishing emails the audience should be educated, go to the root cause of the problem: sending phishing emails pays off, just like sending spam, sadly because they get response. If no-one would open or click through a spam or phishing message they have received the amount of spam and phishing messages being sent in the first place would drop to neglicible levels and services like these would not be necessary.