Deliverability and authentication
Email marketers have to be concerned about getting their messages to their intended audience.
Regardless of how many hours you spend on getting the copy just right and the care you put into your creative, it will all be wasted if your emails are not delivered.
We recommend reading the Direct Marketing Associations whitepaper 'Email Deliverability: How we Got Here and What Marketer's Should do About It' co-authored by our very own director Tink Taylor.
Authenticating that an email was sent from a valid source has become the first step ISP use in filtering spam.
ISPs use authentication to verifying the claimed domain name in the emails they receive.
There are a number of ways ISPs authenticate a sender's domain name:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
SenderID
DomainKeys
To ensure the highest deliverability rates dotMailer ensure that when we set up a domain name for you we included all these best practises.
Below we explain in more detail what these are:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
SPF allows the owner of an Internet domain to use special format of DNS TXT records to specify which machines are authorised to transmit email for that domain.
For example, the owner of the clientname.co.uk can designate which machines are authorised to send email whose sender email address ends with "@clientname.co.uk".
Receivers checking SPF can reject messages from unauthorised machines before receiving the body of the message. SPF exploits the authority delegation scheme of the real Domain Name System.
SenderID
The Sender ID Framework is an email authentication technology protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing and phishing by verifying the domain name from which email messages are sent.
Sender ID validates the origin of email messages by verifying the IPaddress of the sender against the alleged owner of the sending domain in a similar way to SPF
DomainKeys
Put simply, domain keys are pieces of information contained in each email message that enable the receiver to identify whether the message has actually come from the sender it claims to have come from.
DomainKeys provides a mechanism for verifying both the domain of each email sender and the integrity of the messages sent (i.e,. that they were not altered during transit).
And, once the domain can be verified, it can be compared to the domain used by the sender in the From: field of the message to detect forgeries.
If it's a forgery, then it's spam or fraud, and it can be dropped without impact to the user.
If it's not a forgery, then the domain is known, and a persistent reputation profile can be established for that sending domain that can be tied into anti-spam policy systems, shared between service providers, and even exposed to the user.
The diagram below shows the journey a marketing email goes through to either get into the intended inbox, or find itself filtered into Junk Mail or bounced back by the ISP.
