Return Path has overhauled its popular Bonded Sender program after soliciting feedback from marketers, publishers, ESP's, ISP's etc.. The service has been renamed Sender Score Certified and is doing away with the entire "bond" concept, which was not popular with most users of the service. We have been a reseller for Bonded Sender and have had great success with the service. I am however much more excited about the overhauled program. As Matt Blumberg, Return Path's Chairman & CEO writes:

"What we learned was that the program was ground-breaking when it was launched in 2002 but that it needed a makeover in order to meet the challenges that have evolved around spam and deliverability for both senders and receivers during the past few years."

Taking that feedback, Matt and his team have executed and launched a better, more efficient email accreditation program. The highlights of the new service include the following, which are listed on Return Path's website. Congrats to Matt and his team.

Per Matt blumberg, New Sender Score Certified features include:

1. New and Improved Data: the program is now powered by our newly launched Sender Score Reputation database, which George wrote about last week – a robust source of reputation information sent to us daily by scores of different sources on the Internet, including B2B and B2C, domestic and international, ISP and commercial filters;

2. Complete transparency: the Sender Score Reputation Monitor service allows clients to have 100% visibility into every metric tracked for the program, including some super-cool drill-down features;

3. Bye-Bye, Bond: these high standards make the bond unnecessary (and they really made us need to find a new name – can you imagine Bondless Sender?). You’re either on the list, or you’re not. The transparency makes it much easier for us to work with our clients on compliance; and

4. Radically Reduced Complaints: the new standards have allowed us to raise the bar on the quality of the program. We’ve built the statistical model underlying the program to have a VERY high correlation with some leading spam filters, enabling us to remove a huge number of senders who were previously on the whitelist. The result? Our largest ISP user, Microsoft, reports to us a nearly 90% drop in the number of complaints in their network coming from users of the program – and that was off a very small number of complaints to begin with, relative to the rest of the email universe.

Think of this score like a credit score for email - telling recievers what kind of reputation you have -  and determining if your delivery of emails is approved. Stay tuned...