• by Ray Schultz , April 8, 2020

Validity, parent company of email service brands Return Path, BriteVerify and 250ok, is offering a free crisis communications package to help government agencies and other organizations send critical emails during thee pandemic.

The new program, Validity For Good, will provide those agencies with temporary access to the Return Path Email Certification service. This will ensure that their emails will land in inboxes, not spam folders, the company says.

Global research conducted by Validity shows that over 1 in 15 commercial emails now are related to COVID-19. However, over 14% of those emails are caught by spam filters. Thus, many legitimate crisis-oriented emails are blocked from the inbox.

“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,” states Mark Briggs, chairman and CEO of Validity.

Briggs adds that “with this huge global volume of COVID-19 email, we saw legitimate, critical emails struggling to reach users -- and we knew we could help.”

In essence, Validity for Good speeds up the Return Path certification process, which demands that firms follow best practices with their email campaigns.

The service is available to infrastructure, governmental and other senders of critical COVID-19 messages. They do not have to be Validity customers.

“Email is the number one channel that states and cities are leveraging for messages related to testing programs and services for people in quarantine, along with medical inventory and so much more,” states Matt Blumberg, Return Path founder and interim director of the State of Colorado’s COVID-19 Innovation Response team.

Blumberg adds: “Validity for Good will play a critical part for both public and private sector organizations that need to ensure that email messages get to the inbox, not the spam folder.”