When my nephew was much younger, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas together on VHS until the tape broke. He even thought his name was Jack the Pumpkin King! The soundtrack will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.
Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, but it's a wonderful commentary on the state of email marketing during the holiday season. I don't just mean that trying to get email delivered is a nightmare starting around Halloween or that marketers find themselves in somewhat different situations than they're used to during the rest of the year. The flow of the movie and the soundtrack fit with how email marketing happens during the holiday season. It happens every year.
There's a dramatic uptick in all email marketing, be it legitimate email marketing or spam, that starts when the weather gets cold. Some years, it triples or quadruples normal email volume. And that means slower mail servers, more filters, more complaints, and slower response times. It also means overworked, cranky mail and abuse admins. I know. I've been one of those cranky abuse admins.
The rules surrounding email deliverability, which are confusing enough, get more complicated during this time of year. It feels like every company you have ever driven past and every partner of theirs is vying for your attention. There are a lot of little things that you can do, from holiday ramp-up strategies to promoting special holiday-only marketing campaigns that draw customers in.
I'll leave you for now with this very important thought.
Engagement is more important than ever. If you don't get the attention of your recipients, you'll find your email in the spam folder or blocked during your most crucial sales period.
As I've been writing this, the song "Making Christmas" has been running through my head. It makes me want to ask which mindset do you have for your email campaigns, going into this holiday season?
"Snakes and mice get wrapped up so nice with spider legs and pretty bows.
It's ours this time."
(Your focus is on your ideas of what your recipients should want. You reach years back into your subscriber database. You send out email to people who didn't give you permission.)
Or
"This thing will never make a present. It's been dead now for much too long.
Try something fresher, something pleasant."
(Your focus is on what your customers are really interested in. You're interested in actively engaged subscribers rather than the number of subscribers on your list. You use dynamic content to create a one-to-one experience for your customers.)
If you're an ExactTarget client using SMS to enable targeted 1 to 1 communications you should have received an email on October 1, 2009, informing you of a change to industry regulations.
Here's what the email stated:
Beginning October 1, 2009, industry regulations state that the phrase "Standard Message charges apply" is no longer acceptable as standard messaging in SMS communications. For all digital advertising formats and message flows, one of the following phrases must be used in its place:
Message and Data Rates May Apply
Msg&Data Rates May Apply
Msg&data rates may apply
Msg&data rates may aply
View the ExactTarget SMS Regulation resource page for more information and helpful links to ensure that your Text Messaging campaign and communication programs are compliant.
Integrations with partner products is one of the things that makes ExactTarget so dynamic and powerful. Centralizing your electronic marketing software to work with your CRM, CMS, analytics, or other packages lets you accomplish more with less time, energy, and money.Here's just a few of the new integrations available:
SeeWhy
SeeWhy, creator of the Abandonment Tracker Pro web analytics service, is now offering an integration with ExactTarget. This integration intends to optimize real-time email follow-up campaigns that can convert up to 50% of website abandoners to customers.
XMPie
XMPie, who offers "One-to-One-in-One" is now incorporating ExactTarget email service into its PersonalEffect Cross-Media and e-Media products.
Printable Technologies
Printable Technologies Inc., provider of web-to-print and marketing personalization solutions, has integrated ExactTarget email capabilities into their product MarcomCentral.
You can see many more available integrations on the Integrated Partners page on our website. Categories of integration include, but are not limited to:
- Content Management System Partners
- CRM Partners
- Deliverability Partners
- Survey Partners
- Web Analytics Partners
According to the “2009 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey” from the Association of National Advertisers and Marketing Management Analytics, “The No. 1 strategy for marketers who wanted to improve effectiveness without spending more, according to the June 2009 poll, was shifting from traditional to digital media. More than one-half of respondents also reported shifting spending away from brand-building initiatives, and 38% were putting more spending into lower-cost media.”
And as more marketers shift to digital media, the tactic that is seeing the largest increase in spending is email.
According to the “2009 Media Survey Results & Analysis” study conducted by Round2, “40% of US Marketers reported that they had increased spending on email marketing in 2009.
What This Means for Marketers
Increased dependency on email marketing means three things:
1. Email is no longer optional. It has firmly established itself as the #1 tactic for 1to1 marketing. And email has become the “go to” tactic for word-of-mouth marketing as brands empower email subscribers to “share” email messages and offers with their friends on Facebook, their followers on Twitter, and their connections on LinkedIn.
2. Email marketing will become more sophisticated as marketers move aggressively to integrate email with other tactics and technologies – like CRM, SMS, POS, Websites, and Social Networks -- that are used to keep customers connected to the brand. The cornerstones of effective email marketing will be Integration, Automation and Optimization.
3. ESP (Email Service Provider) selection will become a more strategic decision. Marketers must evaluate and select an ESP by their ability to provide “industrial strength” application functionality plus consulting services including 1to1 marketing strategy, email and landing page design, email deliverability, and application integration.
One of the most frequent questions that we in Deliverability Services get asked is how to keep Comcast blocking from recurring.
Comcast aggressively blocks mail they deem their users don't want--even more so than other receivers. Right or wrong, they have filtering in place that they believe is effective and offers their users maximum protection from spam and unwanted mail. Ultimately, their obligation is to meet the needs of their users and not necessarily to meet the needs of senders.
The two biggest reasons Comcast blocks mail is because a sender's mail earns too many complaints or because a sender is sending to too many invalid Comcast addresses.
Senders are understandably upset when their mail gets blocked at Comcast, but by and large blocks are avoidable and are the result of less-than-great sending practices.
To avoid blocking by Comcast, or any receiver, ensure that you're sending mail to subscribers who have explicitly opted-in, are expecting to receive your mail, and will find the mail relevant.
If your sends keep getting blocked, it's time to review your sending practices. Is your opt-in clear and explicit? Do subscribers understand what you'll be sending to them and how often you're going to send? Are you meeting those content and frequency expectations or are you sending more frequently than you said you would or different content than you said you would? If a subscriber opted-in for your mail six months ago, are they still going to find the mail relevant and look forward to receiving it or has your mail now become just another of dozens they receive daily?
If you answered "no" to any of the questions above, it's time to change your practices to meet your subscribers needs and expectations. That may include less frequent sending, changing your opt-in, making your content more relevant and more of a one-to-one communication, or simply asking your subscribers if they still want to hear from you, which is known as re-engagement.
ExactTarget is excellent at helping clients get wanted and expected mail delivered and helping to maximize delivery and return on investment. However, if you're not meeting your subscribers' needs and expectations or continuing to send to addresses that are no longer valid you're going to continue to experience delivery issues at Comcast and possibly other receivers.
For more email deliverability tips and Best Practices, check out our free whitepaper, "Email Marketing CAN-SPAM Compliance."Click tracking. We all do it. It's a best email practice. We all want to see who is following our links, what draws our subscribers in. Was this targeted email marketing campaign effective? What was the most interesting part of the email? Where are my readers engaged? Was this email campaign better targeted than last week's?
But how you do it makes a huge difference with spam and virus filters. What do I mean? I'll tell you a secret. Phishers and spammers like to use IP addresses and URIs of popular websites in the text of their emails and then put in HTML that makes it look like the recipient is clicking on http://www.bank.com. But you don't do that, right? What you might do is use http://www.partnercompany.com or even http://www.yourbusinesssite.com in the email that you're sending out through your favorite ESP, ExactTarget.
That's a no-no. Definitely not an email deliverability best practice. Why not? Because you want us to track email clicks in those targeted emails. You have a domain set aside just for us and that's the domain that we use for your email campaigns. Your subscribers see http://www.yourbusinesssite.com, but they click on a link to http://email-yourbusinesssite.com.
And that, my friends, looks like you're trying to be tricksy.
"So what do we do, email guru?" you cry in despair. Let me give you a little email design tip that will make a huge difference with filters like Postini and MessageLabs (both of which are used frequently in B2B email), or email providers like Gmail and Hotmail.
Use your words. Wow your targeted opt-in audience with your awesome descriptive powers.
Look how we've grown! or http://www.exacttarget.co.uk/
Come party with us! or http://www.connections09.com
In 2003, with the introduction of MySpace, the way we communicate with one another drastically changed.
Last year, MarketingSherpa ran a survey to help it better understand society’s perception of social media regarding its role in marketing communications. What did these marketing experts discover, you ask? They found that 97 percent of respondents use social media platforms, like MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook as complimentary marketing mediums to the current communication king – email.
So why are email service providers like ExactTarget not threatened with the rise in social media usage? The answer is simple. Email, as a means of communication, allows social networking sites to send relevant information to its users. Social media enterprises have realized the convenience and effectiveness of email – hence the reason you receive an automated email when someone posts on you Facebook wall or sends you a Linkedin connection request. Essentially, your personal email account funnels all activity that occurs throughout your numerous social media accounts into one location. For this reason, email isn't going anywhere – at least anytime soon.
So where does ExactTarget fit in this picture? We fully understand the importance of social media and its ability to expand the reach of your email marketing campaign. For example, another resource that should be added to your marketing arsenal, as a means of facilitating subscriber list growth, is the social forward feature.
In the past few years social media has emerged as an effective tool in the marketing world, however, we agree with the 97 percent that still find email is the primary means of marketing communication.
Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. – Irene Peter
As I am looking back over the 14 weeks that I have been here this summer, one of the biggest things that has hit me is that ExactTarget is not just an email marketing company. They are not just an email service provider. They are truly a one to one marketing company that has a full line of products to help increase the marketing ROI for a company.
Yes, we do email. We actually send some of the most intelligent and customer-driven email through our dynamic content capabilities.
But what else is in our product line?
SMS: We have the ability to develop and execute powerful SMS text message campaigns to engage customers on the spot.
Voice: We have a product that can send targeted and specific messages to consumers by telephone. Adding this personal touch moves a company way beyond simple TV advertisements.
Landing Pages: These microsites enable users of ExactTarget’s already powerful email software platform the chance to call customers to action through a targeted website, designed specifically for the particular action.
When a company uses all four of these tools together, they have the ability to become a very sophisticated marketer that engages consumers in a relevant way.
Kyle Schroeder
Slingshot Summer Intern
One question I find that comes up all the time is: what is embedded?
To begin to answer that question, you have to first know what ExactTarget’s software does. ExactTarget is not simply an email service provider, but a One-to-One Marketing software that services permission based email marketing, SMS marketing, and voice campaigns for companies throughout the world.
So what is embedded?
In the simplest form, ExactTarget Embedded is a product integration of the power of ExactTarget’s one-to-one marketing software with an external application. Companies then build their own tools and software on top of the platform ET has created.
Both independent software vendors (ISV) and web-based applications are prime candidates for embedding this platform into their list of tools.
Let’s say I sell a CRM tool and want an email component as well, ExactTarget can be embedded into that software and is then powered by ExactTarget.
If I am an eCommerce site that offers web-based services and want to offer email marketing in my product mix, then ExactTarget can be embedded into the platform I am already using.
In both of these examples, the end customer never knows that they are using ExactTarget because the company provides its own look and user interface on top of the ExactTarget software.
Kyle Schroeder
With so many communication channels available between Twitter, RSS, Facebook, LinkedIn, SMS, Email, and not to mention broadcast TV, how do marketers cut through the noise and be heard by their audience? One To One Marketing is your insurance plan of choice. I'm a self-proclaimed Google Reader Junkie and find myself on Twitter throughout the day, but what do I actually read? I stop to read content that is aligned with my personal and professional interests. It's as simple as that. Email deliverability is essential, but so is getting the attention of your reader when they decide to open, read, mark as junk, or click through your message content.As a marketer, if you have done your homework and performed audience segmentation and analyzed the demographics along with their behavior, why waste that valuable information without sending personalized and compelling content? When you create your integrated marketing campaign, I suggest that you begin with a strategy that covers all the key aspects from your toolkit: email, SMS, landing pages, and voice, all mapped out to maximize the user experience.
Content personalization takes your insurance policy to the maximum level. Beyond personalizing their name on the email itself, consider adding dynamic content that is meaningful to the recipient. This will help ensure that your direct marketing program is successful.
Web analytic data helps drive remarketing efforts, as well. Think of the marketing possibilities when you can segment your audience based on their interaction with your website within the last 5 days.
Check out our whitepaper "One-to-One Marketing Field Guide Set" that describes effective use cases and strategies to leverage a comprehensive marketing program with email, SMS, landing pages, and voice. That is what One To One Marketing is all about!
This made me begin to wonder if email clients like Gmail and Yahoo would take a page out of the SSL certificate industry’s playbook. If you go to any of these sites you will notice when you click on “Login” that the address bar in the browser changes. Not only does it go to the https site, but the address bar also appears green with the company’s name and logo in it. Companies pay good money to provide this piece of mind to their customers.
What does the future hold for email deliverability? Will the Googles and Yahoos of the world start charging each company if they want to be put on the whitelist to ensure commercial email is delivered? With many email providers out there, it could get very costly and confusing if you had to work with each one individually to make sure your 1 to 1 Marketing campaign was a success.
Regardless of what the future holds, having a strong Email Service Provider will help alleviate many headaches. To learn more about working closely with you ESP to improve deliverability, check out another great post by Al Iverson, You Control Your Deliverability Reputation, but Your ESP is Critical to Ongoing Success.
Over on Email Insider, George Bilbrey of ReturnPath provides some very good advice on how senders are ultimately in control of their own ability to enjoy deliverability success. He writes, "From time to time we run into marketers who think that they have deliverability covered because they have signed up with an Email Service Provider (ESP). You've probably even seen some ESPs that are promoting their very high delivery rates. This is confusing and misleading, because the ESP fully controls only one of the five major drivers of deliverability failures."Though there is a caveat or two, this is actually very solid advice. So much of deliverability is driven by your list hygiene and send practices. But, I do believe that an ESP brings a lot to the table; empowering you to get as much of your mail delivered as possible. ExactTarget is actually pretty darn good at doing this, if I do say so myself. George explained five different things that impact your deliverability, and explained that only one of them is controlled by the ESP.
True, but simplistic. What about proactive block and bounce monitoring? Customizable blacklist alerts. Specialized reporting to review and monitor your sending reputation. Active deliverability and strategy consultation. The Big Rolodex of every ISP we've ever dealt with. Active multi-client experience, helping you understand if the deliverability issue you're facing today is really aimed at you, or if you're only in the cross hairs accidentally due to an ISP issue.
We help you translate all of this crazy data and these complex issues into plain English terms that can be easily understood so that clients can apply our best practice guidance to their day-to-day email marketing campaigns.
On the flip side of that, there's a secret that ESPs rarely reveal: ESPs are very bad at getting bad mail delivered. If you're a spammer, ISPs want to block you. No amount of "ISP Relationship Management" on the part of ExactTarget or some other ESP is going to prevent that. What we do instead, is teach you how not to be a spammer. The ExactTarget application does some of the work there; it sets you on the right track to process bounces, feedback loops, authenticate mail, and so on. But none of these things can overcome a deliverability issue caused by poor permission practices.
In that way, George is absolutely right. People are very much mistaken if they think that they are all set just because they happen to be working with an ESP. You can't discount the fact that high complaint rates, bounce rates, spamtrap hits, and content issues all play a role in your deliverability. Get these things wrong and your deliverability is sure to suffer. To that end, these are things that we help ExactTarget clients address every day, but George is right: these are all data points that refer to what is being sent and whom it is being sent to, not which ESP platform it is being sent from.
The moral of the story? I think we're both right. What do you think?
ExactTarget has an excellent internship program that is well developed and focused on providing worthwhile experiences for both the student and the company.
I hear from many of my friends that they just aren’t be utilized at their internships. They sit around and surf the internet for 6 of the 8 hours they are on the clock because they don’t have anything to work on.
That is not the case at ExactTarget.
This is week #7 for me and I am juggling a handful of meaningful projects. I have been able to work with several different people and departments and take on work that is significant and challenging. I didn’t really know much about the world of email service providers or email marketing software, but after an intense week of training and a dive headfirst into the channel sales department of ExactTarget, I have picked it up.
I would strongly encourage any company to carefully consider how they build an internship program. Be willing to challenge and push your interns. Let them fail. But, should you hire the best and brightest, maybe they will succeed.
Keep in mind, this all begins with recruiting the best talent. Using a targeted email campaign or SMS marketing can be a great way to reach out to college students. 
While undergoing this process, make sure you emphasize three areas of your company:
1. What an intern does and how you will challenge them.
2. The kind of culture your company has fostered.
3. The core values that are rooted in your company.
You will find these are important questions that college students have when they think about and talk up companies.
Kyle Schroeder
Slingshot Summer Intern
Marketing to the Gen Y College Student’s Interests
In Experience, Inc.’s Recruiter Whitepaper, they suggest marketing to student interest as a way for today’s companies to recruit Gen Y employees. They found a discrepancy in students’ top fields of interest and fields they find job offers in (page 5).
Experience suggests tailoring job postings to fit student interests may increase recruiting yield. I think they are right on track of keeping information relevant.
An opt in email marketing campaign can be one way to connect with Gen Y and keep them updated with job information that might be different from someone in their 40s. The ability to develop targeted email campaigns is another feature of a quality email service provider, like ExactTarget.
Kyle Schroeder
Slingshot Summer Intern
The spam that you receive in your inbox on any given day is probably only a fraction of what is actually sent to you. This is because Internet Service Providers (ISPs) evaluate the content of the emails that are sent to you and reject many of them.There are many different factors that an ISP can use to tell if an email is spam. Without knowing all of the criteria that the ISPs judge emails against, it's possible that you could accidentally include content in your email marketing message that causes the ISP to think it's spam.
Content Detective is a tool within ExactTarget that helps you identify spam triggers in your email content. this feature mirrors the logic used by spam-filtering software to identify words, phrases, and patterns that are likely to trigger filters. It then recommends a resolution to each identified problem. After you run the Content Detective, you can then edit the email to remove the triggers.
Typically, having just one potential trigger word or phrase will not affect your email's deliverability. However, if two or more potential triggers are found, you should remove them to improve your email's chances of being seen by the subscriber.
Note that Yahoo appears to be bouncing this mail in error. No ExactTarget IP address is blacklisted by Spamhaus. Also note that various industry sources have indicated that this issue is not specific to ExactTarget. List managers utilizing other email service providers (or sending via their own server) are also running into this issue.
On May 27th, Yahoo sent the following notice to the Yahoo Mail Admin email list: "We have received reports that some senders are seeing intermittent IP blocks when sending to Yahoo! Mail, with the SMTP error message from us citing that the block was due to a Spamhaus listing -- e.g., "553 5.7.1 [BL21] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus PBL." (See our full list of SMTP error messages at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/ <http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/> .)
If your IPs are currently not listed on any Spamhaus blocklist but you are seeing this error, please be assured that we are looking into the matter. We shall post an update once we have resolved the issue."
Spamhaus noted this issue on their blog on May 30, 2009, referring to the blocking of mail under these circumstances as "erroneous."
Note that we have been working directly with Yahoo on this issue throughout the past week, and will continue to do everything within our power to drive this issue toward resolution as quickly as possible. As the situation is out of our control, we are not able to provide an ETA for resolution.
If you have any questions, please contact ExactTarget's client success center or deliverability team through the usual channels. We'll be sure to update everyone with more information as soon as possible. (Click here to sign up for this blog's RSS feed.)
Subscriber engagement refers to recipients caring about the email you send them. Recipients who read your emails, who open them (load images), who click on links, these are your engaged recipients.
Having a low level of subscriber engagement means your deliverability is going to suffer. ISPs notice that recipients don’t care about your mail. The smart ISPs notice which emails, which sending IP addresses, which senders, send mail that people want, and which ones send mail that people don’t want (or don’t seem to care about). These top ISPs use this as one of their “stack rank” measures to decide which mail to deliver to the inbox and which mail to deliver to the spam folder. If your mail has a very low open rate, a very low click through rate, you’re likely to be ranked low enough that it’s going to push your mail to the spam folder.
Gmail, in particular, seems to be very watchful on this front. And, if you run afoul of this problem at Gmail, you really don’t have any options for immediate recourse. They don’t typically respond to sender requests for assistance, and what their users want takes precedence over a sender’s desire for the inbox. Few other ISPs feel any differently.
The ISP won’t fix it, so what do you do? Here’s what I’ve learned: What you need to do is stop mailing to people who don’t care about your emails. You’ve got a wealth of data at your fingertips that tells you who is opening (loading images), who is clicking on emails you send via ExactTarget. Take those subscribers who have opened or clicked at least one recent email from you, and consider them your core of engaged subscribers. Try restricting your sends so that you are mailing only to those subscribers. Continue that process for a few weeks of solid sending, and you’re going to improve your sending reputation at most ISPs.
After you’ve climbed your way back to the inbox, it’s time to figure out what to do with your un-engaged recipients, all those people who have never opened or clicked on any email message you’ve sent. This is where testing and application of marketing strategy can come in handy. I’ve seen test data that suggests that in some cases, sending to unengaged subscribers less often will help to get them more interested and help to get them to open or click on your email messages. (This helps when subscribers were simply overwhelmed by the amount of email you’re sending.) I’ve also seen cases where that’s not enough to keep you out of the spam folder in the long term, and what you need to do is re opt-in (reconfirm) your unengaged subscribers. They’re not looking at your emails anyway, so don’t be afraid to send them off after one last “hurrah” – send them an offer for a discount, freebie, or spiff, and ask them to click on a link to remain on your email list. If they don’t respond, stop mailing them.
What happens after all of this is that you’ve cleaned up your mailing practices so that a greater percentage of the mail you’re sending is perceived as wanted. The net result is that you look like a better sender from an ISP’s perspective, which is just about the only perspective that matters when trying to get your mail delivered successfully.
ExactTarget is a member of MAAWG, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. MAAWG is comprised of internet service providers, email service providers, webmail providers, direct senders, security/anti-virus-related technology companies, and other related entities. MAAWG exists so that all of these constituencies can work together to collaboratively address spam and security issues.
I’ve found MAAWG to be a useful forum to work both with senders and receivers to address issues relating to spam and best practices. It’s helpful to hear other perspectives and to learn from many different experts, all with different experiences and areas of focus.
If you are a MAAWG member, and if you work for a direct sender or email service provider, have you signed up for the Sender Subcommittee email list? At the last MAAWG general meeting, Laura Atkins and I found that a lot of senders don’t seem to know about the email list.
Hence, my post here. If you’re an email sender, and you’re in MAAWG, and you haven’t signed up for the Senders Subcommittee email list, please do so! It’s very valuable, and the more folks that join in on our discussions, the more good work we’re able to accomplish together.
If you don’t know how to sign up for the senders list, feel free to contact Laura Atkins or I, and we’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.
(Note that this is for MAAWG members only. If you’re not a MAAWG member, this doesn’t apply to you. If you send your emails through an email service provider, that entity (i.e. ExactTarget) is where you would want to start to discuss best practices and email abuse-related issues. Probably not MAAWG.)
I'm active in a lot of the different email industry groups, and on a number of those lists, the hot topic lately is DKIM – DomainKeys Identified Mail.
What is DKIM? Wikipedia explains that DKIM “is a method for E-mail authentication, allowing a person who receives email to verify that the message actually comes from the domain that it claims to have come from.”
A lot of the ongoing discussion surrounding DKIM relates to what people want from the specification. Senders (ESPs, big brands) and receivers (ISPs, spam filtering device manufacturers, and MTA (mail transfer agent – i.e. “mail server software”) publishers seem to want different things from the spec.
Anything I tell you about my desires for the specification are certain to be tinted by my own biases. As is the case with anyone. But, allow me to be up front about those biases. I'm a representative of a sender, email service provider ExactTarget. But I also have a strong history in the realm of blacklists, having created more than one of them myself, and having worked with various ISPs over the years to help them filter out spam.
So what do I want out of DKIM? I want two things out of DKIM, or out of email authentication in general:
Enable better whitelisting. Prove that mail from domain.com really came from domain.com, and then a receiving site has the ability to better develop statistics specific to those messages. Maybe IP address reputation doesn't go away, but if an ISP can see that very few messages sent from a domain generate complaints, I suspect the smarter ISPs are going to be more likely to allow that mail through, regardless of its source IP address. (The flip side of this is that if I'm a bad sender, it becomes harder to sidestep a bad reputation by changing IP addresses. This I believe to be a feature, not a bug.)
Enable better blacklisting. Is there a better way to promote message security? Block, or more heavily filter, unsigned mail, especially if it comes from a domain where you've recognized that other messages sent are being signed properly. This is controversial, and it's hard to say if it would ever come to be. But this is about what I want, and this is what I want. I want, when signing up for an ISP feedback loop, or registering with a spam filterer or MTA vendor, to be able to tell them that all of my mail is signed, and that you can feel free to discard or reject unsigned mail.
Pros: Stops a lot of phishing in its tracks. Helps recipients to understand that if the from domain is “ebay.com”, the message really did come from eBay.
Cons: Doesn't stop “lookalike domain” attacks. (What if the message came from ebay7.com?) Some technology experts really hate the idea of using DKIM in this way, because they feel that a system issue would cause a legitimate message to be nuked. I think the risk here is lower than others represent, and I also think that some of the folks making this case, while I respect them, they do not run abuse desks at large ISPs. I find it hard to believe that ISPs would never consider this.
Making things better for those who send mail isn't my only consideration. Making things easier for those who block or filter mail is also very important to me. If I ran a spam filter, how would I want things to work? That's part of where I'm coming from here. How does DKIM, or authentication in general, fit into a spam filtering strategy?
So what do YOU want out of DKIM, or out of email authentication in general? Comments and feedback welcome. (Please keep it gentle – I won't approve any comments with insults.)
Here's the most common way you can run afoul of a phishing filter. See this bit of HTML code?
<a href="http://www.cnn.com">www.yahoo.com</a>
That bit of code says it is linking you to Yahoo, but it's actually taking you to CNN. It's a very simple trick, but it is a trick employed by bad guys, and if your URLs look like this -- where the link domain doesn't match the domain written out in your email -- your message will look like a phish or a spoof.
You're much less likely to have this issue, if you make sure the domain matches in both places:
<a href="http://www.cnn.com">www.cnn.com</a>
Even better yet, try not to write out the URL domain at all. Use something like this instead:
<a href="http://www.cnn.com">Visit CNN's website</a>
That way there's no domain to compare to, and you'll avoid a phishing issue, even if you enable link tracking in ExactTarget (and aren't using a custom domain with ExactTarget).
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