Today Google owned Postini reported that worldwide spam levels had returned to levels not previously seen since before the shutdown of the McColo web hosting service 4 months ago.  After the shutdown of McColo spam levels fell nearly 70%.  Spam volumes have been steadily increasing this year by about 1.2% per day.  The new technology employed by spammers appears to be a peer to peer spambot network that doesn’t rely on central nodes like those deployed at the McColo data center.  Spammers are also using a new location-based technique to lure users to websites with news headlines and video based on local events.  When the user clicks on the video their computer is infected with a virus.

Needless to say a new spam threat and an increase in spam levels will cause ISPs to double and triple their efforts to combat these mail messages from making it into their users inboxes.  This will continue to challenge your ability to get your legitimate email into these same inboxes.  Email delivery of legitimate marketing email and transactional email messages will require a much more intelligent and adaptable technology to maintain and protect IP address reputation and adjust to changes in ISP delivery rules.

In a previous post we unveiled a new IP tagging and warm-up feature.  This is the first of several new features we are rolling out over the next several weeks that will enable the next generation of intelligent email delivery to improve email deliverability.  More on these new features to come.

I am frequently asked about the expected open rate for email messages. According to the Technology Marketing Benchmark Survey, published by Marketing Sherpa, the average open rate for email blasts in 2008 was reported to be 22%. Overall the open rate has been declining steadily over the past five years from 39% in 2004.

Open rates are calculated by placing “beacon” images into HTML messages, with the source of those images on a remote web server. When these images are loaded into the recipient’s email reader and are requested from the remote web server, the “open” is registered.

The decline in open rate may be more attributed towards a greater number of email clients blocking images, rather than acceptance of email.

This information as well as many more useful marketing benchmarks can be found in Marketing Sherpa’s 2008-2009 Technology Marketing Benchmark Survey.

The latest Hurricane MTA Server beta build includes exciting new deliverability increasing features. Each IP on Hurricane MTA Server can now be tagged with a user defined id which can be used to classify IP addresses.

Delivery rules can then be tagged to restrict them to IPs with the same tag. To tag a delivery rule, you simply append the tag to the end of the mask/domain with a pipe symbol as in the example below for hotmail.

As you can imagine this opens up some powerful possibilities. For example you could tag certain IPs according to their reputation (or lack of) and then build delivery rules targeted towards those specific groups of IPs. As in the example above, this could easily be used to warm up new IP addresses. But it is not limited to that. Create as many tags as you want to group IPs and apply delivery rules in any way you choose.

Since each Hurricane MTA Server account can serve more than one IP, you can have IPs with different tags assigned to the same account and the server will automatically apply the correct delivery rule / throttling to the IP being used. This makes it possible to have multiple IPs with different reputations, each serving the same account, but being throttled individually.

Another new feature of the delivery rules is the new “Action” setting that can be used to force a delivery rule to defer or fail outbound messages immediately. This can be very useful if you need to pause or purge the queue for specific domains.

We have many additional exciting new features on the way, which I will announce as soon as possible in this blog.

This feature is currently in beta. For instructions on how to get the latest beta, log into your support account, and view this KB article.

Please comment and let me know what you think.

July 10, 2009 Update: this feature was released into production on June 30, 2009.