Member Article

Ensuring email continuity during a global pandemic

Following the global outbreak, email communications have seen a sharp increase – and important and critical messaging has either failed to reach inboxes or been swamped by a stream of marketing. To tackle this, Validity has released a new crisis communications programme, Validity for Good.

The new programme is free for government agencies and organisations that send critical emails, such as those related to the coronavirus pandemic. With this, agencies and organisations are temporarily granted access to an email deliverability service, giving their email campaigns trusted treatment to help ensure that their critical emails arrive in inboxes, not spam folders. Using this email delivery service, organisations can ensure messages related to public safety and COVID-19 reach their subscribers.

“The email ecosystem is being flooded with COVID-19 communications, which means emails like critical infrastructure updates are being mixed in with a stream of marketing emails, personal communications, and the unfortunate steady influx of unwanted spam,” said Mark Briggs, chairman and CEO of Validity. “With this huge global volume of COVID-19 email, we saw legitimate, critical emails struggling to reach users – and we knew we could help. That’s what spurred Validity for Good.”

As email remains the most critical communications channel related to the global pandemic, organisations face the increasing reality that their emails are not getting through to constituents, citizens, and customers. Central to communications and mitigation, these organisations are finding they need to ramp up communications to both the public at large and their constituencies, requiring them to send to their full email lists, therein creating issues for the recipients’ email systems and spam filters. Further complicating the process, bad actors are taking advantage of the global emergency communications efforts by transmitting dangerous messaging, including phishing, malware, ransomware, and spam in the name of COVID-19. In many cases, this is overwhelming spam filtering algorithms and materially reducing the effectiveness of email communication.

The company’s recent research, which analysed data across 2.5 billion mailboxes worldwide, found that in the past two weeks COVID-19 messages have been taking over email. More than 1 in 15 commercial emails sent globally pertains to COVID-19, over 14 percent of COVID-19 related emails are caught by spam filters (including many legitimate, crisis-related emails that never make it to the inbox) and complaint rates for COVID-19 related marketing emails are steadily on the rise, suggesting an increase in bad actors.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by D Baker .