Return Path’s Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report
Return Path recently released its Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Here is George Bilbrey’s high level take on what they found:
- Most of the servers sending email shouldn’t be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were legitimate, well-configured, static email servers. It’s important to point out that this doesn’t speak at all to the quality of the messages from those servers – lots of horrible spammers know how to configure a mail server. The other 80% of the mail is coming from servers that are either identifiably bad or unidentifiable and probably bad. No wonder ISPs and other large receivers feel besieged.
- Servers with good reputations get their messages delivered. Servers with bad reputations don’t. This might seem obvious to those of you reading this blog, and of course it is. But again, having that empirical data is gratifying. We found a direct linear relationship between an IP’s Sender Score and that IP’s average delivered rate. Of course I have to point out here that it is not the low Sender Score that is causing the delivery problems, a common misconception. The reputation issues that give an IP a low Sender Score are what also cause that IP to be blocked from inboxes.
- Specific best practices have a direct result on an IP’s delivery rates. We found a 20 point difference in delivery rates for IPs with just one spam trap hit. For servers with unknown user rates above 9% the difference was 23 points versus servers with cleaner data.
- Blacklists don’t cause blocking, they predict it. We found that servers listed on any one of nine public blacklists (the lists studied are noted in the report) had an average delivery rate of 35% versus 58% for servers not on these lists. But the reason is not that those blacklists are used by receivers. In fact, some of them are not used very much at all. Much like with the Sender Score, the behaviors that land a server on the blacklist also cause that server to be blocked by many receivers.
Read the full report now and check out Karen J. Bannan’s 5 tips on how to increase deliverability here.
