PHOENIX – (May 15, 2007) – Pivotal Veracity, the number 1 rated Deliverability Service Provider for the last two consecutive years, is pleased to announce its participation in developing the MAAWG Sender's Best Communications Practices guide.

In whats being heralded as a "major milestone", MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) just announced and formally promulgated a set of best practices that were endorsed by the ISP and ESP communities known as the Sender Subcommittee Best Communications Practices (BCP) Document v1.1. Pivotal Veracity is a long-term member of MAAWG and MAAWG's Sender Subcommittee and played a critical role in developing and editing this important guide.

Best Communications Practices document (BCP)
The Best Communications Practices document covers five primary topics and offers recommendations for regulatory and industry compliancee. These five topics cover everything from the habitual practices of mailing to more technical recommendations that deal with email sending architectures and the unsubscribe mechanisms as components of the email ecosphere. To read the full Best Communications Practices Document click here.

BCP Executive Summary also available
The Executive Summary document is presented as a summary primarily of Sections 3 and 4 of the BCP because of the technical discussions involved in these sections. There is also a list of definitions and an ESP Vetting Questionnaire at the end of this document to assist readers. We recommend reading the Executive Summary as a quick layman's guide to some of the more technical recommendations contained in the full BCP. To read the Executive Summary which covers sections 3 & 4 (Enhancing Sender Accountability and Messaging Reputation | Managing Delivery Errors and List Maintenance), click here.

Pivotal Veracity
Pivotal Veracity is committed to improving the email channel through proactive industry involvement, developing robust tools to enhance your customer's email experience and engendering best practices that strengthen the position of legitimate marketers by improving ROI through insight and metrics. For more information about this or other topics relating to deliverability or best practices, please contact Pivotal Veracity at 602-971-0502.

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MAAWG Official Press Release
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San Francisco, May 15, 2007 - In a major milestone toward industry agreement on how senders can distinguish their legitimate volume email from unsolicited spam, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has issued the MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices (BCP) with collaborative input from both volume senders and Internet Service Providers. The new best practices recommend sender email technologies and subscription methods to improve deliverability rates for newsletters and permission-based email marketing.

Developed by MAAWG, the best practices involved the industry’s largest ISPs, network operators and vendors approving recommendations that were also endorsed by sender firms and other trade associations. Immediate support for the MAAWG Sender BCP has come from CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) and the Email Sender & Provider Coalition (ESPC), according to Dennis Dayman, MAAWG senders subcommittee co-chair and StrongMail Systems, Inc. director of deliverability.

“Both senders and ISPs are allies fighting the same battle, but in the past there has been a language gap between them,” Dayman said. “The senders were asking, ‘what should we do to work more closely with the network operators?’ so MAAWG tackled the issue on a global basis. In these best practices, we have outlined very specific steps that senders can take to reduce the accidental tagging of legitimate email as spam while still protecting consumers from the eighty percent of email traffic that is abusive."

A Different Technical Approach; Supplemental Information for Marketers

The MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices also includes a supplemental Executive Summary for marketers who often manage volume email projects, which was edited by Len Shneyder of MAAWG member company Pivotal Veracity. The summary explains some of the technical recommendations to improve email deliverability and provides a questionnaire marketers can use to determine if their Email Sender Providers are operating within industry best practices.

The complete BCP addresses five topics of concern to both marketers and operations professionals:

• Obtaining email consent
• Recommended unsubscribe options
• Sender accountability and reputation
• List maintenance
• Resolving messaging disruption issues

The recommendations are based on reputation management techniques that help identify the sender as the genuine source of the email. This approach differs from the content filters already used by many ISPs to tag messages containing suspicious words or phrases as spam. For example, the MAAWG Sender BCP recommends that service providers managing email for multiple companies, online marketing agencies and other vendors that send large volumes of emails for multiple clients use a separate IP address for each company so that ISPs can determine that a message has come from a verifiable entity. The best practices also include methods for managing subscriptions and improving consumer relationships.

Collaborative Industry Efforts

The document is gathering momentum. In the United States, CAUCE Chair Scott Hazen Mueller said, “This is a remarkable first step. Coordination between the sending and receiving communities is critical toward mitigating the scourge of spam on the Internet.”

The CAUCE Chair in Canada, Neil Schwartzman, recognized the importance of the MAAWG best practices as, “a logical evolution” of the BCP document submitted to the Canadian Minister of Industry by the Federal Task Force on Spam that was developed in part by CAUCE Canada.

The Email Sender & Provider Coalition also provided input into the document and supports the best practices. "Both senders and receivers have a stake in preserving email as a channel for legitimate communication and commerce, and only by working together can any real change take place," said Trevor Hughes, ESPC executive director. "The MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices reflect this shared commitment. The ESPC is pleased to have participated in its development and we look forward to working with MAAWG and its members to instigate further positive change in the future."

The complete Sender Best Communications Practices document is available at the organization’s Web site, www.MAAWG.org.

About the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG)

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) is where the messaging industry comes together to work against spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks and other online exploitation. MAAWG (www.MAAWG.org) is the only organization addressing messaging abuse holistically by systematically engaging all aspects of the problem, including technology, industry collaboration and public policy. It leverages the depth and experience of its global membership to tackle abuse on existing networks and new emerging services. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., MAAWG is an open forum driven by market needs and supported by major network operators and messaging providers.