by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
2. octubre 2009 02:59
Internet Service Providers are changing their spam filters. How does this impact you, the legitimate email marketer? In their exclusive report , Pivotal Veracity recently highlighted the fact that domain-based reputation has arrived. A number of top ISPs including Yahoo and AOL are said to augment IP-based reputation systems with portable domain-based reputation systems for those mailers using DK/ DKIM authentication. This means, ISPs will “attach” your spam complaint rate, unknown user rate, and spam trap rate to your domain, in addition to your IP. So even if you switch IP addresses, you get to keep your domain-based reputation – for good or bad.
So what can you do to make sure emails get delivered?
First of all, reputation is and will remain of your own doing To get reputation you need to be using a domain in your “from” address that links to you. That means don’t use generic domains like (@hotmail.com or @gmail.com) as your from address. If you are not already start using an email address with a domain that you control that you can begin to create a reputation for. For example, if your email address was james@wyofarm.com your reputation would be calculated on past and current behavior on the sends originating from the domain wyofarm.com and not just a IP address which relates to the server from which the email originated and not 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 will probably be in full swing at the beginning of next year. Other ISPs will follow suit.
How can we help you build your reputation?
If PivotalVeracity is right then having your FROM domain properly authenticated, will become increasingly important. So if you haven’t already implemented DKIM on your domain, it’s time you consider doing it. DKIM is a process that uses public-key cryptography to guarantee that the from sender is actually the domain owner. To implement it the sender attached an electronic signature to the email that is then matched against a signing module saved at the DNS. If you don’t know how to generate the keys the public and private keys needed to implement DKIM, then will GraphicMail's tool will create them for you.
What else are we doing?
Almost all ISPs now base whether or not they will deliver emails to client’s inboxes on some ratio of the complaint rates they receive from their clients against sends originating from IPs or domains. ISPs share these 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. We mark those as complaints against the client’s account so they’re aware that not everyone that has received their mail is happy with it 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
