Word to the Wise

In a blog post on April 28, AOL pointed to their new Sender Best Practices document. These are not things a sender must do in order to get mail delivered to AOL, but rather things that will help improve your reputation at AOL.

The recommendations are what I have been recommending for a while and there is nothing overly surprising in the recommendations.

• Send mail users want and expect
• Separate your mail streams
• Suggest recipients add the From: address to their address book
• Make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe
• Minimize your invalid users
• Use DKIM to authenticate email

All of these are good suggestions for sending any email to any recipient

This also adds AOL to the list of ISPs supporting DKIM. If you are not yet signing with DKIM, you should be planning the deployment path to signing.

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A few weeks ago, NetworkWorld posted an interview with Mark Risher of Yahoo. In it, Mark talked about how Yahoo had no plans to outright block or refuse any unauthenticated email. Of course authentication will be a large part of their decision making for incoming emails but they cannot just refuse to accept mail that is unauthenticated, because there are times when unauthenticated email is the most important mail to their recipients.

A lot of marketers often seem to forget that they are competing for time and space with other, non-marketing, types of email. Email from friends and family and discussion lists are both more important to most people that the latest and greatest email advertisement. These are the emails people want to receive, the ones they open, read and respond to.

In terms of authentication, right now the majority of wanted emails are unsigned with DK or DKIM.  Sure there are the early adopters who are using DK/DKIM to sign their emails, and a few large ISPs have started signing outgoing email. But until the vast majority of wanted email is actually signed, recipient ISPs are going to have to accept unsigned email.

Looking forward, even if all of the ISPs sign email sent through their SMTP servers, there will still be some fraction of desired email that will be unsigned. Individuals and small businesses who choose to run their own mailservers may not sign email. Even though these servers make up a tiny fraction of total email, they make up a much larger fraction of wanted email. ISPs cannot block this email without angering their customer base.

Marketers should not be concerned about ISPs blocking unauthenticated email, as it is extremely unlikely that any major ISP will do that. Marketers should focus, instead on making their email relevant and wanted by the recipients. I have been recommending clients plan to have all their outgoing emails DK/DKIM signed by the end of 2008.

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The great folks over at MailChimp have compiled a list of which authentication methods (DK, DKIM, SPF and SenderID) are in use at which ISPs.

Good stuff and very clear showing who is using what authentication.

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I did not have a lot of predictions for what will happen with email at the beginning of the year so I did not do a traditional beginning of the year post. Over the last 3 - 4 weeks, though, I have noticed some things that I think show where the industry is going.

Authentication. In January two announcements happened that lead me to believe most legitimate mail will be DK/DKIM signed by the end of the year. AOTA announced that approximately 50% of all email was currently authenticated. They did not separate out SPF/SenderID authentication from DK/DKIM authentication, but this still suggests email authentication is being widely adopted. AOL announced they will be checking DKIM on their inbound mail. I expect more and more email will be DKIM signed in response to this announcement.

Filtering. The end of 2007 marked a steady uptick in mail being filtered or blocked by recipient domains. I expect this trend to continue throughout 2008. Recipient domains are rolling out new technology to measure complaints, evaluate reputation and monitor unwanted email in ways that tease out the bad actors from the good. This means more bad and borderline email will be blocked. Over the short term, I expect to see more good email blocked, too, but expect this will resolve itself by Q2/Q3.

Sender Improvements. As the ISPs get better at filtering, I expect that many borderline senders will discover they cannot continue to have sloppy subscription practices and still get their mail delivered. Improved authentication and better filtering let ISPs pin-point blocks. Instead of having to block by IP or by domain, they can block only some mail from a domain, or only some mail from an IP. There are a number of senders who are sending mail that users do not want mixed with mail that recipients do want. Right now, if there is more mail that recipients want in that mix, then ISPs let the mail through. This will not continue to happen through 2008. Senders will need to send mail users actively want in order to see good delivery.

Less is more. A lot of other email bloggers have talked about this, and I will echo their predictions. Less email is more. Send relevant mail that your customers want. Target, target, target. Good mailers will not send offers to their entire database, instead they will send mail to a select portion of their database.

Feedback loops. Use of feedback loops by recipient domains will continue to grow.

Mobile email. More recipients will be receiving email on mobile devices.

Suggestions for 2008

1. If you are not signing mail with DKIM, you should plan to by the end of the year.
2. Review your privacy practices, and your signup process before then end of Q1. Specifically look at things from a user and a use-ability perspective. If this was not your company, would you still sign up here?
3. Sign up for your own mailing list. See how much email your recipients are receiving. What user experience are you treating them to?
4. Monitor your bounces and rejections. Generate reports so you know where your mail is not being delivered and why.

Overall, I expect to see a lot of consolidation, emphasis on good practice and tighter filtering. I think the first half of 2008 is going to be challenging for marketers, as what worked in the past is not going to work in the future. Mailers are going to be held to a much higher standard in the past and are going to find it more difficult to hide bad mail in a stream of mostly good mail.

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This really should be part seven of a twelve part series or some such as it deals with an aspect of DKIM that’s really important, but is way down in the details of implementation. (dkim.org is a reasonable place to start for a general overview of DKIM).

There’s an apparently endless thread on the DKIM-SSP spec development mailing list at the moment about the differences between two fields in a DKIM signature that could be used to tie a senders reputation to. Several ESP delivery folks asked me to explain what everyone was talking about, and this post is a first cut at that.

“i=” vs “d=”

There are two possible fields in a DKIM signature that could be used to identify the sender of a message, and so to tie a sender history and reputation record to. They are the so-called “i=” and “d=” field, from the syntax used to include them in the signature.

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Yahoo announced this morning that over the course of the next few weeks Yahoo would roll out a new feature to their email that blocks any unauthenticated email from eBay and PayPal.

In a blog post Nikki Dugan says:

Our weapon is a technology Yahoo! spearheaded called DomainKeys, which uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. In overly simplified terms, if the email’s originating domain ain’t really eBay.com or PayPal.com, it ain’t going through.

DomainKeys / Domain Keys Internet Mail have seen steady adoption by senders and receivers over the last few years. As more and more companies are signing outgoing mail, more and more receivers can make delivery decisions based on those signatures. This is the first time a sender and a receiver have announced an agreement that all non-signed email will be rejected.

Hat tip: Matt

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