Fred Wilson calls it EZ Pass for Email. It’s the best metaphor for what Return Path’s Bonded Sender Program does and Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – explains it very clearly on his blog.
We had high hopes for Bonded Sender when we acquired it from IronPort Systems in April of 2005. Now that we’ve had several months of experience with Bonded Sender, our expectations – based on what we are seeing – have been exceeded.
Return Path analyzed 100,000 email campaigns across clients who were accepted into the Bonded Sender Program while already using Return Path’s delivery monitoring services. The results over a 90 day period were very significant. Email deliverability rates increased on average by 20.6%. 250 million mailboxes are represented by the 35,000 domains (corporations, ISPs, colleges, and filtering packages) that use Bonded Sender as an email accreditation service (think of Fred’s EZ Pass metaphor – if you are a member of the Bonded Sender Program, 35,000 domains let your email pass through their spam filter).
While I’m spending a lot of time with RSS these days, we’ve also historically made a lot of email-related investments, including Email Publishing / MessageMedia (email service provider), Critical Path (email hosting), and Postini (email security / anti-spam / anti-virus service). Return Path continues in this investment thesis and – given both Fred and Matt’s awareness and understanding of both email and RSS – you can expect some nice email / RSS cross-over action as we continue on our quest to make email as effective and safe as possible.