October 11, 2005
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 as good as being blocked or bounced. Justin’s secondary point is also a good one. An email service provider only has a limited amount of influence over a mailer’s inbox placement rate. Service providers can and must set up an ironclad email sending infrastructure; they can and must support dedicated IP addresses for larger mailers; they can and must support all major authentication protocols — none of these things is in any way a trivial undertaking. In addition, service providers […]