Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

Want to know how a SPAM Firewall works?  Cisco, who makes the IronPort Email appliance, has also put together a short, 8 minute video that explains how their SPAM firewall works.  It Cisco-specific of course, but does a great job of providing an overview of operation.  http://www.ironport.com/products/how_it_works.html

Once you’ve got the basics under your belt, check out our Webinar: Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery.  its about 55 minutes long and explains in detail how an email is delivered, and explains Email Firewalls in more detail.

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 that we don’t want…”

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 to that list is going to look like a wave of spam. Again, authentication (and maybe some email certification) may smooth things out a bit.

Not too long ago, Bellsouth started blocking HTML emails randomly (no idea why – perhaps a Bellsouth employee can enlighten us?) Interestingly, since Pinpointe authenticates all of our customers’ emails by default, our emails seemed to get through just fine.

One thing to keep in mind however is that authentication (and authorization) do not give you a free license to start creating and sending spammy, low value email content. Your content is still going to get filtered. Authentication and authorization help receiving systems to know, with absolute assurance, that you are who you say you are.

DKIM Authentication – Disadvantages

Authentication has a few minor drawbacks worth noting. These are relatively minor and only occur in edge cases, but for full disclosure – here are the downsides:

If you are using an ESP who is doing DKIM signing, you “might” see this scenario. Depending on the email software being used by the recipient, your email may be displayed to some recipients as follows:

Sent from mail.pinpointe.com on behalf of john@yourcompany.com

For most people, that’s not a big deal – but the receiving email might be displayed like this.

Authenticated emails can occasionally get rejected by mobile devices if the email is forwarded. Here’s the scenario. You send an authenticated email to your customer account. The message’s authentication says, “this message is only authentic if it came from Pinpointe Server [server-name],” but the recipient forwards the message from his company account to his Blackberry. The Blackberry server receives your message, but since it was forwarded from your recipient’s company server, it appears to be a forgery when they read the authentication instructions.

The bottom line is this: if you have a big list (tens of thousands), you should be working with your ESP to do authentication and authorization to help improve email delivery. If your list is relatively small (in the hundreds) then you probably don’t need it yet – but start getting yourself educated on the topic. 

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 deploy the emerging DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard:

Step #1:
Figure out all the domains that are allowed to send outbound mail on its behalf. Often this includes multiple corporate domains as well as third-party e-mail Service Providers (like Pinpointe). This is often the hardest step – especially for large organizations.

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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 – asking you to update your account information. Email protocols (like SMTP) do not include Authentication support, so a recipient of a message has no confidence that the message they are receiving is from whom it claims to be from. DKIM is a way to permit a receiver of a message to validate that a message is, in fact, from whom it claims to be from.

DKIM, which stands for “Domain Keys Identified Mail”, lets an organization insert a cryptographic signature on outbound e-mail and associate that signature with its domain name. The signature travels with the e-mail regardless of its path across the Internet. The recipient of the e-mail can use the signature to validate that the message came from the organization’s domain name. (If you’re a Pinpointe customer – you don’t have to worry – by default we use DKIM signing for all of your emails). DKIM won’t eliminate e-mail fraud altogether, but it will help companies that are targets of phishing scams to give their customers a way of ensuring they sent a particular message.

DKIM is a merger of two protocols: DomainKeys, which was created by Yahoo, and Identified Internet Mail, which was created by Cisco. These companies along with other ESP’s and ISPs work with the IETF’s DKIM working group on technical specifications.  DKIM has been under development since 2004 and it’s finally reaching a critical mass: we expect to see Enterprises implement DKIM through 2009-’10.

DKIM Usage will Boom in 2009-10

DKIM adoption is accelerating, especially among banks, mortgage companies and insurance companies. It’s pretty easy for a corporation to go out and deploy DKIM because there are now enough commercial products that have DKIM support, and many Email Service providers (“ESP”s), like Pinpointe are now supporting DKIM authentication. Now that the standards are complete and compliant products are readily available, many enterprises will implement DKIM in their email systems in 2009. In order to ensure your emails are not blocked by these domains, you’ll want to ensure your emails are being sent with DKIM enabled.

If you want to learn more, we cover authentication and authorization (DKIM and SPF) in our recent Webinar: Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery Topics.  Here are a few examples validating that DKIM  is quickly gaining critical mass:

• BITS, a group of 100 of the largest U.S. financial institutions, last year recommended that its members adopt DKIM by October 2008. The fact that 100 large financial institutions are throwing their weight behind a standard together is going to help drive rapid DKIM adoption.
• BITS also recommends either Sender ID Framework (SIDF) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to validate that a received e-mail originates from an authorized mail server within a particular domain. (Read our Blog Tutorial on setting your SPF record correctly.)
• ISPs are adopting DKIM because they want to protect their customers against spam and phishing scams. E-mail senders are tying to protect their brands, identities and customers from phishing scams.
• Ebay, PayPal and banks in general have always attracted fraudsters and “phishers”, so PayPal and eBay are signing their e-mails with DKIM to battle what are called Phishing attacks. [link] Yahoo will block e-mails claiming to be sent by eBay and PayPal that haven’t been signed through DKIM.

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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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 giving domain owners a way to say which mail sources are legitimate for their domain and which ones aren’t. While not all spam is forged, virtually all forgeries are spam. SPF was created in 2003 to help close loopholes in email delivery systems that allow spammers to “spoof” or steal your email address to send bzillions of emails from another company’s domain (like yours). 

SPF is an open standard – it isn’t owned or controlled by any one body or company.  More information about SPF can be found at:

• http://www.openspf.org/Project_Overview
• http://old.openspf.org

Why do I want to have SPF records for my domains?

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According to new marketing data from MarketingSherpa, 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.  Chances are, your email looks downright awful when viewed on a Blackberry or similar.

The ‘use scenario’ we are seeing is that people use their mobile devices / smart phones to do real-time checking (often skimming) of email, and make a quick decision whether to keep the email and read it in more detail later, or delete it. They then go back and review / act upon more important emails from their desktop.

The survey also indicates mobile email users don’t click on links from their Blackberry or PDA — only 54 percent have ever clicked on a link from their mobile device. Users don’t make online purchases via these devices either (well, not in the US anyway – Europe and AsiaPac are different markets altogether).

A Few Tips for Emailing to Blackberry Users

This is common sense stuff but follow these quick tips, and you’ll improve responses overall:

• Deliver brief, interesting messages in multi-part MIME (both regular HTML and text-only versions).
• Revise your Goal: Aim for the Follow-up.  Since Exec’s using a Blackberry are only skimming and not clicking – make sure the value proposition is concise, clear and uncluttered, and you might as well do away with the links.  Entice the reader to review the email in mode detail when they return to their desk.
• Don’t put links to graphic images at the very beginning of your email.  Depending on the device’s settings, the recipient may simply see an a bunch of links.  The recipient either has to scroll forever (a major source of thumb-cramp syndrome) or more likely, they’ll just delete your email.
• Include a link to the web-version of your email. Most ESPs have this feature – when you create an email, an HTML version is automatically created and hosted on the ESP’s website. Try sending a text-only email with a brief introduction and a link to view the message as a Webpage. This also allows users to view the HTML version when users later view the email on their computer.

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 email marketing, automatically process bounces and either remove them from your email list(s), or change the email status from ‘Active’ to ‘Bounced’.  Hard bounces are automatically flagged and removed from your list so that you do not ‘waste’ email credits sending to non-existent emails (doing so can also damage your email credibility).

A ‘Soft‘ bounce is an intermittent, temporary condition. For example, the recipient’s email server might be temporarily overloaded or offline; the recipient might be over their inbox quota size or there might be a temporary problem with the remote server configuration.  The most common type of ’soft’ bounce reported is ‘Blocked Due to Content’ – you guessed it – caught in a spam filter.  (Tip: Reduce Blocked Due to Content’ errors by running your online spam checker when editing your email campaign.)

Soft bounces are automatically re-tried up to 3 times over the next 4 days, per campaign. After 3 campaigns (a total of 9 retries), if an email is still undeliverable, it is then considered a hard bounce and the status in Pinpointe is changed to ‘bounced’.

Our first series of webinars – starting with ‘Email Marketing 101′ focus on straight-forward tips to improve delivery with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control.  The followup webinar can be downloaded here or at the bottom of this post – “Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery Issues“.

In this Webinar, (aka “How Email Delivery Works“) ProspectDB and Pinpointe take it up a notch and explain in detail, the end-to-end trials and tribulations of an email message as it flows from your outbox to (hopefully) the recipients inbox. This webinar is more technical and ‘deeper’ than our previous webinars – you might want to point your IT team to these slides. Our goal was to not only leave you with a dozen or so specific tips, but to help you understand all the places where your email can get tripped up before finally hitting the recipient’s inbox.  Topics include:

• Review CAN-SPM Requirements
• Update: How current Enterprise Email Filters work
• Tracking an Email from send to delivery: possible pitfalls along the way

You can download the on-demand version and slide deck at the bottom of this posting. And hey, please Diggit!

Here’s an overview diagram – you can also download the slide deck and on-demand version of the presentation here…

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