Top 10 E-mail Trends of 2009: Return Path

E-mail deliverability and reputation-management firm Return Path has released what it has deemed to be the top 10 e-mail trends of 2009.

The Top 10 Emails Trends in 2009, according to Return Path, were:

1. Spam growth continued – Reports in early 2009 estimated daily spam volumes are more than 117 billion emails every day. In addition, image spam increased in 2009, a problem for enterprises and ISPs using outdated email security software.

2. False positives increased – “False positives” are when a legitimate, requested, and wanted email is mistakenly blocked outright or delivered to a bulk folder by a spam filter. Receivers increased their use of trusted whitelists in an effort to identify legitimate email.

3. Phishing impacted everyone – Criminal enterprises increased their phishing in 2009 – sending forged emails from banks, social networks, and brand marketers to gain account access. Return Path believes that a coordinated effort, including government (policy and enforcement), educational, infrastructure operators, financial institutions, and more must participate in coordinated efforts toward a solution.

4. Rise of the Social Inbox – Communications from social networks are becoming entwined with traditional email. A beta version of Outlook 2010 integrates social networking, and MySpace announced an integration of email with the MySpace social network experience.

5.Complaint Rate Feedback Loops Gained Greater Prominence – Complaint rates, when an email is marked as spam, continued to be a key reputation metric for email senders in 2009. Via feedback loops, commercial senders can monitor, in real time, when users report their emails as spam.

6. More transparency at ISPs – Most ISPs are providing “postmaster pages” to improve transparency and provide key information about email delivery into their network. In 2009, new postmaster pages were released by AOL, Cox Communications (North America), and T-online (Germany).

7. Mergers & Acquisitions – In 2009, many ISPs in North America and Europe were acquired or merged with other ISPs. These mergers are important to marketers as new ISPs have their own metrics and tools for determining legitimate email from spam.

8. Gmail Continued Its Growth – In 2009, Gmail surpassed AOL and became the third most popular Web-based email application behind Yahoo! and Microsoft.

9. Outbound Abuse On the Rise – In Return Path’s discussions with ISPs in 2009, the ISPs reported challenges with abusive email sent from their own networks via compromised accounts, reputation hijacking, and botnet infections.

10. Email did not Die! – Despite the many headlines in both the mainstream media and blogosphere, email’s demise was greatly exaggerated. Email marketing continues to have the highest ROI of all direct marketing channels, including search. And, a recent survey found that college students aged 18 to 24 would give up watching TV, social networking, and talking on the phone before giving up email.