Probably (almost) all Badsender readers know ReturnPath, at least by name. For several years, the American company has established itself as one of the main providers of data related to email deliverability. This includes solutions for advertisers (reputation monitoring, rendering tests, performance analysis solutions, competition observatory, delivery certification, ...), but also for operators and security-oriented services.
The issue that interests us today is that of certification. Historically, ReturnPath certifies the IP addresses of actors who request it, and if this certification is accepted, they have the possibility of avoiding certain controls by ISPs and partner webmails. In France, for many years, it is mainly to better deliver to Hotmail (and to a lesser extent to Yahoo!) that advertisers ask for a certification. But since several months, this one has also an influence at Orange and Laposte.net, which increases its relevance. Of course, this certification is sold and you have to pay a subscription to have access to it. The second condition is also to pass an audit to prove that your practices are irreproachable.
As with most reputation scores, ReturnPath certification has always worked on the basis of IP address. This allowed operators to have a reliable identification criterion and provide ReturnPath with performance information to verify that a certified IP was still in compliance with the required quality criteria.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with Didier Colombani, ReturnPath's SEMEA & Benelux Regional Director, who explained to me that this certification based on IP addresses alone did not allow certain players to benefit from it. For example, if your router only provides shared IP addresses with other customers of the solution, you could not request certification. This could also make it difficult to access certification if you use multiple routers or frequently change IP addresses.
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For this reason, ReturnPath has decided to launch a new solution of certification based on the domain name of dispatch, thus allowing advertisers affected by the situations described above to have recourse to it. Didier Colombani clarifies that this is another certification in parallel to the one based on IP addresses (we have no information on prices). Firstly, because today, not all ReturnPath partners have yet migrated to this model (but Hotmail has already done so) and secondly, because the reputation data flows need to be reviewed from top to bottom to ensure compliance of certified emails.
This new system has been tested for several months in the US, and is now available in France. It will be deployed progressively to ReturnPath's French customers.
3 réponses
Interesting article, but when you say "as one of the main providers of data related to email deliverability", to my knowledge ReturnPath is the only one to have such a close relationship with the various ISPs and other ESPs (especially Microsoft). This monopoly may cause some problems, but what other players do you know?
Interesting indeed but few French provider still included unfortunately (Orange...) and cost all the same relatively high (rates are online) for a result finally difficult to measure if in parallel one cleans well its base. To be reserved for the biggest sender I think.
Florian > There are not really any competitors to ReturnPath on the deliverability aspect (except maybe Certified Senders Alliance but they are not really interesting in France). On the other hand, there are quite a few other players who provide data to ISPs and Webmails, ReturnPath is far from having a monopoly on the subject: VadeRetro, CloudMark, ... not to mention Spamhaus and others.