It's widely known that the basis of any relationship is trust. This certainly applies to your relationship with your coveted email subscribers. The ever-growing numbers of spammers and phishing attacks has caused so much frustration and distrust that it has created a major obstacle for legitimate email marketers. The Email Service Providers (ESPs) have a responsibility to protect their customers from unwanted email. Email marketers have the responsibility to make sure that the messages their subscribers signed up to receive are getting through. Thus came the conundrum of email authentication.

The email industry has teamed up to create AOTA (Authentication & Online Trust Alliance) giving us three ways of to approach email authentication. None of these approaches are required yet but we have accepted that including at least one is standard best-practice email marketing for 2008.

SPF / Sender ID Record Wizard SPF / Sender ID Record Wizard - Use this tool to create SPF records by entering your domain name and including the IP addresses of third parties authorized to send mail on your behalf.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) - A signature-based mail authentication standard for for validating an identity that is associated with a message. The base DKIM specification has been approved by IETF as a proposed standard. DKIM is a synthesis of earlier specifications from Yahoo! (DomainKeys) and Cisco (Identified Internet Mail).

Sender ID Framework - Overview of the SenderID Framework (SIDF), including presentations, white papers and technical specifications. SIDF reflects the combined specifications of SPF and Microsoft's Caller ID for email proposal. (Hosted by Microsoft Corporation)

The main advantages of email authentication is increasing deliverability by making a more secure marketplace and improving or regaining the trust of the ESPs when using a third-party email marketing service. A main goal of authentication is to reduce spam and phishing attacks which will boast the integrity of email marketing.

If you have any question about email authentication or would like to have Blue Tent take the necessary steps to get your email program authenticated please contact us today.

Ryan Austin
Director of Email Marketing