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Email Authentication – DKIM and SPF: Which ISP’s are Checking?

By on April 20, 2009 in General Tips

At Pinpointe, we’ve been using DKIM and SPF for nearly a year for our customers – at no extra charge.   If you want to know more about which ISP’s are presently using Authentication and/or Authorization to verify the validity of your email (and thereby decide whether to deliver your email or possibly drop it into Ethertrash) – you can download the full table a the ESPC Coalition site here: A brief summary is included below: Receiver DKIM Domain Keys SenderID SPF AOL XX    XX    Bell Canada  XX  XX XX    Bellsouth  XX    XX XX  Charter        XX Comcast     XX  XX  Cox.net XX        Earthlink  XX XX    XX  Gmail XX XX    [...]

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Will DKIM Reduce Phishing and other Email ‘Spoofing’ Attacks?

By on April 20, 2009 in Email Authentication and Authorization, Message Deliverability

DKIM is an email ‘authentication’ method that organizations and ESPs like Pinpointe use to verify to the recipient that the email is coming from a valid email server, and is not being ‘spoofed’ by a spammer. In an interview, Mark Risher, the anti-abuse product manager for Yahoo Mail gives his perspective on how important DKIM signing is: “I would describe it as profound. As we’re crossing the tipping point of this technology, we will see even small senders like a small bicycle shop sending out a newsletter using DKIM. It’s really moving us to a much better, more responsible, easier-to-manage network. As the receiver protecting the largest number of user in-boxes, there are messages we want and there are messages [...]

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DKIM / Authentication Advantages and Disadvantages

By on April 20, 2009 in Email Authentication and Authorization, Email Response Rates, Message Deliverability

We cover an explanation of DKIM Email Authentication in our blog entry DKIM Email Authentication.  Here we’ll summarize some the top advantages and disadvantages. DKIM Authentication – Advantages If you have a very large list, your campaigns are more likely to get blocked or “throttled” by major ISPs like AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. However, if you are using DKIM authentication, (or if your ESP is doing DKIM signing), the throttling limits are often raised by some domains. Potentially less stringent SPAM filtering. If you send marketing messages, email firewalls can be harsh when they scan your content. For example, if you have a large number of email subscribers that are all in the same domain, then sending a campaign [...]

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Deploying DKIM Authentication in 4 Simple Steps

By on April 20, 2009 in Email Authentication and Authorization, Email Response Rates, Message Deliverability

DKIM is an emerging e-mail authentication standard supported by Yahoo, Google and others ISPs, as well as a growing number of Email Service Providers like Pinpointe and that was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. DKIM allows an organization to cryptographically sign outgoing e-mail to verify that it sent the message.  Deploying DKIM for your company is pretty straightforward. If you are managing all of your own email servers and outbound email, including sales, marketing and transactional emails, there are 4 steps.  If you are using an ESP like Pinpointe- there are 2 very simple steps that take about 10 minutes.  Here’s the rundown. Configuring DKIM (Companies Managing their Own MTAs) A company needs to take 4 steps to [...]

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What is Email “Phishing”?

By on April 20, 2009 in Glossary, SPAM Topics

You know those annoying emails that pretend to be from PayPal, EBay or the local bank, asking you to login to your account and validate your password or other credentials? Those are “phishing” attacks – you’ve officially been “phished”. According to Wikipedia:  “Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically done via email or instant messaging and directs you to enter details at a fake website that usually is almost identical to the legitimate one. Read more about phishing on Wikipedia.org

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