As advocates and detractors of the impending implementation of Goodmail’s Certified Email service at AOL and Yahoo continue to battle, Return Path thinks commercial senders can all benefit from its Sender Score concept.
People make judgments about email they receive, by reading it, filtering it, or tossing it out unopened. Return Path believes it can take some of the mystery out of the process by providing a service to monitor just how recipients handle an email marketer’s messages.
The company recently announced its Sender Score Reputation Monitoring service. They build a score based on data contributed by ISPs, filtering companies and other email receivers.
“Any company can look up its overall email reputation score and know exactly how they look to ISPs and other email receivers. Return Path clients also get the underlying data that tells you WHY your score is what it is,” George Bilbrey, VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions, wrote in a statement.
Return Path provided more information about their service in that statement:
Sender Score Reputation Monitor aggregates 60 data points from more than 50 million email boxes around the internet to quantify a mailer’s reputation, looking at factors such as complaint rates, unknown user rates, security practices, identity stability and unsubscribe functionality. Data comes from several major ISPs and filtering companies, including Mailshell, Cloudmark and Lashback.
The company also claims email receiving services are building support for the summary Reputation metric into their systems. Return Path said it will make the score available free of charge via DNS query, a move that should spur more ISPs to use it in the future.
Return Path also noted in a separate statement it would rename its Bonded Sender program to Sender Score Certified. It is the industry’s leading accreditation system, used by more than 35,000 receiving domains, including MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Mail Beta and Roadrunner, covering more than 250 million email mailboxes worldwide.
As part of the change, the program has dropped its long-standing requirement for members to post a financial bond. They also added tougher compliance standards based on data available in Return Path’s Sender Score Reputation Monitor database.
“The standards and metrics are transparent to all involved. Those who don’t comply will be removed from the program swiftly, making the traditional bond aspect of the program an unnecessary step,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path.
“Removing the bond also answers program critics and competitors who painted it – erroneously – as a paid spam program.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
