News & Press Releases

EmailLabs Introduces Advanced Bounce Handling Technology; Keyword Analysis Supplements Current Industry

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (June 16, 2004) - In a move that provides email marketers with more accurate email bounce processing, EmailLabs, a leading provider of email marketing automation solutions, today announced that it has expanded its core technology to include advanced bounce handling and reporting.

The new EmailLabs bounce processing technology augments the currently accepted industry standard for bounce handling. The new technology was developed in response to inconsistent adherence throughout the industry to SMTP recommendations, the current industry standard email protocol. In what has become a growing dilemma for email administrators and ISPs, some receiving email systems return bounce replies that conflict with industry standards, and some email senders are not correctly processing returned replies, standard or otherwise.

EmailLabs' bounce processing technology adds keyword analysis to the existing bounce code standards, and thereby aims to increase accuracy in identifying bounce replies. This capability will help EmailLabs' clients to identify and process bounce replies more precisely. Correctly identifying bounces improves the effectiveness of ongoing email campaigns and decreases the likelihood an ISP will block an email distribution due to an increasing percentage of bounces.

The bounce handling technology recognizes seven categories for an email bounce:

-- Blocked -- delivery was blocked by the receiving mail server

-- Failed -- email address/user does not exist on receiving mail server

-- Suspended -- email account is suspended on receiving server

-- Soft Bounce -- unable to get a response from the receiving server

-- Soft Bounce (DNS Related) -- unable to locate receiving server

-- Temporarily Failed -- Temporary outage or offline state of receiving server

-- System Misconfiguration -- Receiving server not setup properly to receive email

"Thanks to this new layer of keyword analysis on top of the existing bounce code standards, our new bounce processing technology will mean more accurate identification of bounce replies," said Kirill Popov, director of ISP relations and delivery, EmailLabs. "The net result is that our clients will have a better understanding of the type of bounces they receive and act on hard bounces and transient errors accordingly."

About EmailLabs
EmailLabs is a leading provider of high-performance email marketing solutions to agencies, publishers and marketing departments of middle-market and Global 2000 companies. The EmailLabs email marketing platform is provided as an ASP (Web-based) service, and is easily integrated with a company's Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs' application programming interface (API). For the fourth consecutive year, EmailLabs has been recognized by ASPnews.com as one of the Top 50 ASPs worldwide and as a Top 25 Service Provider for the Software-as-a Service (SaaS) and Business Service Provider category. The company provides email marketing solutions to more than 550 companies, including Nokia, Agilent, PalmSource and Jupitermedia. Headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., EmailLabs was founded in 1999 and is a subsidiary of Lyris, Inc. (OTCBB:JLHY). For more information, visit www.EmailLabs.com.