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DKIM Email Authentication in 2011

By on April 20, 2011 in Email Authentication and Authorization, Email Response Rates, Message Deliverability

Email authentication is a way to say, “This email is from Pinpointe’s servers, but it’s being sent on behalf of me, so you can trust it.” It basically prevents your email from looking spoofed (like a forgery).  DKIM is the e-mail authentication standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to address one of the Internet’s biggest threats: e-mail fraud.  As much as 80% of e-mail from leading brands, banks and ISPs is spoofed, at least according to the Online Trust Alliance (www.otalliance.org). DKIM is an important step in rebuilding consumer confidence in e-mail, because DKIM makes it hard (i.e., almost impossible) for evil, fraudulent spammers to send emails where they pretend to be someone else – like your bank [...]

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How do I know if I’m on a SPAM Blacklist?

By on April 19, 2011 in Bounces and Blacklists, Email Response Rates, Message Deliverability, SPAM Topics

We often get the question: “How do I know if my company is on a SPAM Blacklist?” Followed by “If my company is on a SPAM blacklist, how the heck do we get unlisted? There are several hundred SPAM blacklists but luckily, there are a few tools that can help you check most of them quickly. We’ve included here a handy reference with the sites that you can use to check your blacklist status. We’ve also highlighted one or two of the more prominent SPAM blacklists. What you need to know to check Blacklist status

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Hard and Soft Bounces… What’s the Difference?

By on February 12, 2011 in Bounces and Blacklists, General Tips, Glossary, Message Deliverability

Each Webinar series we run, we get questions about the difference between hard and soft bounces. A ‘Hard‘ bounce is a permanent fatal error such as – the domain no longer exists (company went out of business), the email does not exist (the person retired / left the company / died). Most Email solutions, including Pinpointe’s on-demand B2B email marketing, automatically process bounces and either remove them from your email list(s), or change the email status from ‘Active’ to ‘Bounced’. 

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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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Install an SPF Record to Improve Email Delivery

Install an SPF Record to Improve Email Delivery

By on March 24, 2009 in Best Practices, Design for the Inbox, Email Authentication and Authorization, Email Response Rates, Glossary, Message Deliverability, SPAM Topics

This entry applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers.  You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude – we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email delivery’.  If you are using an Emails Service Provider (ESP) like Pinpointe, Constant Contact or Exact Target, then this applies.  If you are just sending outbound emails from Outlook, then this does not apply. What is “SPF” and what does it do? SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”, and helps to control forged e-mail. SPF is not directly about stopping spam – it is about [...]

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How Email Open Tracking Works

By on March 7, 2009 in Email Response Rates, Message Deliverability, Tutorials

Click tracking and Link tracking are built in to Pinpointe, so you don’t have to do anything to generate nice campaign reports to show these results, but it helps to know how these features work. Tracking Opens To track an “open” in an HTML email, we embed a tiny, 1×1 pixel transparent .GIF at the bottom of the message – it’s called a “tracker image” or “web beacon.” Whenever your recipient opens their email, the tracker image is downloaded from the Pinpointe servers, and this is instantly tracked as an email Open.  That’s the way things are supposed to work.  There’s one glitch here though.  Nowadays, thanks mostly to massive amounts of graphic porno spam, as many as 40% of [...]

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