The Email Wars

I was fortunate to join Return Path’s presentation last week in Seattle. It is the first in a traveling local series of events that they will be putting on across the US this year. I highly encourage you to attend if is comes near you. We were a quick 3 hour trip away up I-5 so we jumped in the car and took a drive.

Our CEO, Ryan Buchanan, summarized his take aways on his blog this week.

I attended Return Path’s Seattle Workshop yesterday and learned a lot more about “Email Strategies that Increase Deliverability and Response” than I expected. They even had a guest speaker from Microsoft Hotmail (now branded Windows LiveMail) - Product Planner Brian Holdsworth who shed light on Microsoft’s deliverability strategies. Apparently, over 50% of email browser use is MS Outlook, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.

Here are my notes from the event (Return Path speaker):
Large ISPs getting significantly more email volume each day - recently showing 7.4billion emails per day.

What is Email Reputation?
1. Complaints (Informal)
2. High Unknown Users (unclean list)
3. Spam Traps (spamcop.com and other types of spam-catching email addresses)
4. Sending Infrastructure (IP address must be clean)
5. Sending Consistency (similar daily email volume)

You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.