Return Path Acquires Habeas

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have been an investor and board member of Return Path since 2000.

Return Path is the market leader in email reputation and deliverability. Simply put, they help the right mail get through filters and help ISPs make sure bad mail doesn’t get through. They do this by measuring the reputation of commercial mail senders all over the world. If you send mail, you can check your SenderScore reputation here. You might recall a recent post I did about how Return Path helped Twitter get their SenderScore way up which means their mail doesn’t get stuck in spam filters anymore.

Return Path’s primary competitor in email reputation and deliverability is a company called Habeas. Return Path announced today that they have acquired Habeas and the two companies are now one. As Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s CEO, explains in a blog post, this is a business about scale:

For everyone we work with, this deal means we have even more scale.
More scale is a good thing. It means we can invest more in our future
in everything from technical infrastructure, to product innovation, to
globalization, to employee development. It’s easy to be great when
you’re a 25 person company. It’s actually quite challenging when you’re
a 50-100 person company. It becomes easier again, though in different
ways, when you are a 200 person company with more resources.

Email continues to be frought with problems decades after it was invented. I am hoping that the new Return Path can continue to help all of us make email work better.