Letter to the Editor

Reverse Logistics Magazine, March/April 2007

Dear Editor,

I have an informal agreement with our Administrative Support staff – if they receive a magazine addressed to employees no longer at the company, it is delivered to me. This is how I came across Reverse Logistics Magazine.

Before the magazine, I had never heard the term Reverse Logistics, but as I read I became familiar with the term (and even know what 3PSP stands for now!). I commend you for an excellent magazine on a very interesting topic.

It dawned on me that in my field of email marketing, reverse logistics is key to a marketer’s success. Due to the enormous amounts of spam that are sent by illegitimate marketers, receiving ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like AOL, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail must filter email so that users are not deluged by spam. One of the measurements these ISPs use to determine if a message is from a spammer is by how many messages sent to recipients no longer using an email account.

When somebody sends an email to one of these unused email addresses, the ISP usually returns a bounce message to the sender. It is the sender’s job to process that bounce message and remove that recipient from their list. If the marketer has a flawed process and does not remove the recipient’s unused email address and continues to send to that address, the ISP may penalize that marketer by refusing to deliver email to the inbox of other recipient’s at that ISP.

This illustrates how reverse logistics is an essential aspect of email marketing particularly in maintaining good ISP relations and therefore good deliverability.

Thanks again for a great magazine on the topic of Reverse Logistics.

Jonathan Ogden
Email Analyst
Office Depot
Delray Beach, FL