EZ Pass for Email

I love EZ Pass.  That's the name of the system that drivers use here in the NY Metro area to fly past the tolls at 20+ MPH.

In the 90s, some publication put me on a list of influential people of some sort.  Clearly they were mistaken, but in any case they asked me something like 10 questions.  One of them was what I wished I had invented.  Without hesitation, I answered EZ Pass.

It's a tremendous system.  If you meet the qualifications, pay the bills, and do some upfront work, you get to fly through the tolls.  Ive always loved that idea.

And so EZ Pass has come to email.

It's called white lists.  And they are becoming a real business.  There have been white lists for as long as there has been commercial email.  But mostly they've been kept by mail recievers (ISPs and anti-spam software companies for the most part).

They've been pretty much what they sound like.  Lists of senders that are known to be legit enough to let through wihtout question.

But that approach leaves a lot to be desired. 

First, if every mail reciever has to keep their own white list, how do senders get on every one of them?

Second, its expensive for these recievers to monitor all the senders and determine which ones should be on and off the white list.

It's a classic case of the market needing a third party to provide a shared whitelist.

The oldest and best third party white list program is known as Bonded Sender.

Tomorrow our portfolio company Return Path will announce that it has acquired Bonded Sender and will add this market leading white list to Return Path's impressive set of delivery assurance solutions.

I am really excited about this deal.  Return Path has built a portfolio of services that every emailer needs to have.  Bonded Sender completes the portfolio. 

If you are sending email and have delivery issues, you should be using Return Path, and Bonded Sender.

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, has posted a longer, and better, explanation of all of this on his blog.  If you are involved in email or internet marketing, go read Matt's blog, and become a Bonded Sender and Return Path customer.

Comments

[David]

The Problem: "False Positives" Spam filters block legitimate email. (from the BondedSender.com website)

False Positives ARE a major problem for the majority of andi-spam systems in use today. The reason? Most systems use some sort of system based on the open source "spam assasin" system which when put into a high sensitivity mode to kill large volumes of spam will accidentally kill around 1 in 300 legitimate emails.

Some anti-spam systems rely on the end user's participation, and in most cases, their participation time is actually greater than the time spent just deleting the spam before they were involved in some sort of anti-spam solution.

Obviously, this is not an effective long term solution.

Anti-spam solutions that will be effective and thus succesful long term acheive high kill rates (95%+) and low false posittive rates (< 1 in 1 million) at the same time.

Anti-spam systems need to operate without end user participation and with less than an hour of system administrator management time per week.

Such systems need to be capable of existing in any type of email configuration and work with all known email infrastructures.

And finally, these systems need to be low cost. Not only in terms of technology acquisition but in the annual recurring costs and the soft costs associated with it's operation.

Solutions like Bonded Sender are typical for the email marketing industry to respond to ineffective anti-spam solutions, but they have a major flaw - they are not a "standard" and thus will not get the adoption rate to be effective in the long run. There are too many email systems out there for complete adoption of any sort of system like this to be adopted. The anti-spam solutions of today will be replaced by newer, more effective solutions that will change the landscape of anti-spam.

The false positive problem will, in the end, drive the users of anti-spam systems to switch to a more reliable and trusted anti-spam system, provided it's cost effective and does what it claims.

Obviously, that's where we come in.