Thursday, 1 October 2009
DKIM becomes fashionable ! The DKNY of the email marketing world
Labels:
authentication
,
delivery
,
dk
,
dkim
,
spam
Are
you aware that Internet Service Providers are changing their spam
filters? How does this impact on you as a legitimate email marketer? In
their exclusive report
, Pivotal Veracity recently highlighted the fact that the domain-based
reputation has now arrived. A number of top ISPs including AOL and
Yahoo are said
to augment IP-based reputation systems with portable domain-based
reputation systems for those mailers using DK/ DKIM authentication. This
means that ISPs will “attach” your spam complaint rate, your unknown
user rate, and your spam trap rate to your domain, in addition to your
IP. So even if you switch IP addresses, you retain your domain-based
reputation – be it good orbad.
So what can you do to ensure emails get delivered?
First and most important, reputation is and will remain of your own doing To be sure of a good reputation you must be using a domain in your “from” address that links to you. This means - don’t use generic domains (like @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) as your “from” address. If you do not do so already, start to use an email address with a domain within your control and for which you can begin to create a reputation. For example, if your email address were jo@jofarm.co.uk your reputation would be based on the past and current behavior of the sends originating from the domain jofarm.co.uk and not just on an IP address relating to the server from which the email originated nor the sender from which it originated. This will make each sender more responsible for the delivery rate of their mailings. Both Yahoo and AOL are moving towards this structure and it will probably be in full swing in the early part of next year. Other ISPs are expected to follow suit.
First and most important, reputation is and will remain of your own doing To be sure of a good reputation you must be using a domain in your “from” address that links to you. This means - don’t use generic domains (like @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) as your “from” address. If you do not do so already, start to use an email address with a domain within your control and for which you can begin to create a reputation. For example, if your email address were jo@jofarm.co.uk your reputation would be based on the past and current behavior of the sends originating from the domain jofarm.co.uk and not just on an IP address relating to the server from which the email originated nor the sender from which it originated. This will make each sender more responsible for the delivery rate of their mailings. Both Yahoo and AOL are moving towards this structure and it will probably be in full swing in the early part of next year. Other ISPs are expected to follow suit.
How can we help you to build your reputation?
If PivotalVeracity are right, then having your FROM domain properly authenticated, will become increasingly important. So if you haven’t already started to implement DKIM on your domain, it’s time that you should consider doing it. The DKIM process uses public-key cryptography to guarantee that the FROM sender is actually the domain owner. To implement it, the sender attaches an electronic signature to the email that is then checked against a signing module saved at the DNS. If you don’t know how to generate the public and private keys needed to implement DKIM, then GraphicMail's tool will create them for you.
If PivotalVeracity are right, then having your FROM domain properly authenticated, will become increasingly important. So if you haven’t already started to implement DKIM on your domain, it’s time that you should consider doing it. The DKIM process uses public-key cryptography to guarantee that the FROM sender is actually the domain owner. To implement it, the sender attaches an electronic signature to the email that is then checked against a signing module saved at the DNS. If you don’t know how to generate the public and private keys needed to implement DKIM, then GraphicMail's tool will create them for you.
What else are we doing?
Almost every ISP now bases the decision whether or not to deliver emails to client’s inboxes, on some ratio of the complaint rates that they receive from their clients against the number of sends originating from IPs or domains. ISPs share these rates with ESPs using feedback loops. So every time a client clicks on the ‘this is spam’ in their email client, they let us know that that client didn’t want to receive the message.
We help them close the opt-out loop by unsubscribing these clients and we mark those as complaints against the client’s account which advises them that not all recipients are happy to receive their email and we make the ISPs happy by reducing the amount of unwanted email being sent to their users and as a result they accept more of our mails.
Almost every ISP now bases the decision whether or not to deliver emails to client’s inboxes, on some ratio of the complaint rates that they receive from their clients against the number of sends originating from IPs or domains. ISPs share these rates with ESPs using feedback loops. So every time a client clicks on the ‘this is spam’ in their email client, they let us know that that client didn’t want to receive the message.
We help them close the opt-out loop by unsubscribing these clients and we mark those as complaints against the client’s account which advises them that not all recipients are happy to receive their email and we make the ISPs happy by reducing the amount of unwanted email being sent to their users and as a result they accept more of our mails.
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