It’s hard to believe we are nearing the end of yet another exciting year in email, and 2019 proved to be one of the most momentous and active years to date. Over the past year, the number of new technologies, mergers and acquisitions, mailbox provider (MBP) announcements, news, and highlights is evidence of the versatility and power of the email channel. So before we celebrate and ring in the new year, let’s take a look back at 2019’s most important moments in email.
Industry Acquisitions, Consolidations, and Changes
In 2018, the marketing technology industry saw a steady flow of mergers and acquisitions, with more than $40 billion exchanging hands. The bullish market and rate of acquisitions continued well into 2019.
Notable email service providers (ESPs) continued to seek competitive market advantages through strategic mergers and acquisitions, including Upland Software acquiring Adestra for $56 million just after the publication of our 2018 year in review, Campaign Monitor acquiring both LiveClicker and Sailthru in January, Twilio finalizing the acquisition of SendGrid, valued at $3 billion in February in an all-stock deal, and most recently, MailGun acquiring MailJet in October to expand its end-to-end email platform.
This April alone, we witnessed a flurry of activity with Publicis announcing a $4.4 billion deal to acquire data marketing company Epsilon, IBM selling its Watson Marketing commerce solution to private equity firm Centerbridge Partners, and Ansira acquiring email marketing and eCRM platform BrightWave.Two major deliverability and analytic platforms were purchased, with Return Path sold to private equity backed Validity and eDataSource sold to SparkPost, and anti-phishing company Valimail announced a $45 million Series C investment round this summer.
“As email continues to be the hub of digital marketing and the centerpiece of the all-important customer journey, industry consolidation makes sense,” says Simms Jenkins, CEO of BrightWave, an Ansira company. “The buyers clearly value email’s critical impact, and sellers want to scale up faster to support clients’ increasing needs. It’s as exciting of a time as ever for the email marketing industry, and I expect mergers and acquisitions to continue to play a prominent role over the next few years in reshaping the field.”
There were also a few notable mergers in the email industry, including Output Services Group unitingtwo of its email marketing firms, WhatCounts and Windsor Circle, under one brand, EmailStrategie merging with Dolist in France, and Newlsetter2go combining with Sendinblue in Germany.
Mailbox Provider News
2019 was a memorable year for changes and announcements from mailbox providers, with an extensive list of new features, redesigns, and updates coming from some of the biggest MBPs on the planet.
At the onset of 2019, Comcast switched from using Cloudmark to Vade Secure for their front-end filtering, and OATH officially rebranded as Verizon Media Group.
Google’s Gmail, which enjoyed an electrifying 2018, celebrated their 15th anniversary in 2019. Starting off this year, Google released the newly redesigned Gmail for its mobile app and began enforcing its updated user data policy in January, which spelled the end to traditional email panel data collection practices and access to email panel data for eDataSource and Return Path at the end of March. In February, Gmail implemented an open-source machine learning framework, TensorFlow, resulting in the blocking of around 100 million additional spam messages every day, and they also added more options to the right-click context menu in Gmail on desktop. Gmail unveiled image blocking options to provide users more control over email tracking and, most recently, rolled out dark theme support for Gmail’s mobile app on Android and iOS devices.
This year we also saw Google finally close the door on their innovative email app Inbox by Gmail on April 2. Inbox by Gmail served as a testing ground for many features now available in the newly redesigned Gmail.
Gmail was not the only major mailbox provider to make headlines this year. Verizon Media, owner of Yahoo and AOL mail, had a productive year, announcing support for one-click unsubscribe in February, AMP support in Yahoo mail and releasing a new Postmaster Page (beta) in March, completing the mergerof AOL and Yahoo mail infrastructures under Verizon Media in April, and launching an all-new Yahoo mail app this fall.
“On average, 95% of email sent is brands talking to consumers rather than personal communication,” says Marcel Becker, director of product management at Verizon Media. “Improving the way brands connect with consumers is the driving force in our continued focus on creating better user experiences in email.”
Rounding out MBP highlights, Cox announced in August they would no longer support the creation of new email accounts, and Apple announced the introduction of mail categories to Apple Mail to help users better manage their inbox, and a new Sign in with Apple feature to compete with Facebook and Google.
Email Legislation, Security, and Privacy
On the heels of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect in May 2018, the pace of data privacy and email security developments has not slowed down. We witnessed the first major GDPR fine against Google for $57 million in January, and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announcing its intent to penalize British Airways with a $230 million fine and hotel giant Marriott with a $123 million fine this summer.
Here in the US, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a bill proposed in 2018 with many similarities to that of its GDPR counterpart set to go into effect on January 1, 2020, caused many other states to draft consumer privacy bills this year, including Nevada, New York, and Washington DC. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission voted in February to retain the current rules implementing the CAN-SPAM law, which regulates commercial email in the US.
“The importance of data protection and privacy is becoming increasingly recognized as individuals around the world grow more aware of their rights, and businesses become more aware of the risks that can arise from non-compliance,” says James Castro-Edwards, partner at Wedlake Bell LLP. “Email businesses’ compliance specialists face a complex, global patchwork of data protection and privacy law.”
A new email protocol, Authenticated Received Chain (ARC), was published by the internet engineers task force in July after the specification was announced in 2015. ARC is designed to preserve the email authentication results from SMTP hops when an email is routed from the originating server to the recipient mailbox, and prevent authentication from breaking. Soon after the specification was published, Microsoft enabled ARC for all Office 365-hosted mailboxes in October to improve anti-spoofing detection. Other vendors who support ARC include Google’s Gmail and G Suite, Fastmail, and Proofpoint.
“ARC is an answer to the well-known problem with mailing lists and DMARC,” says Kurt Andersen, senior staff reliability engineer at Linkedin and primary author of the ARC working group. “With more than a dozen independent implementations in both open source libraries as well as private implementations, we look forward to being able to extend DMARC-like protection to an even broader base of recipients, as receivers implement ARC validation and sealing.”
