In a trend that may dramatically increase some e-mail marketers’ ability to get their e-mail delivered, several household-name inbox providers have reportedly confirmed they are increasingly working toward domain-based reputation monitoring.
For marketers who don’t send spam, this is great news and a development to be taken advantage of.
According to e-mail deliverability firm Pivotal Veracity, AOL and Yahoo! are in the midst of implementing domain-based reputation monitoring for mailers that have authenticated their servers using DKIM.
AOL plans to implement domain-based reputation monitoring sometime between the beginning of October and the end of March, according to Pivotal Veracity.
Yahoo! will “soon” begin collecting data based on mailers with good existing reputations that are also using the DKIM authentication scheme, according to Pivotal Veracity.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is implementing a domain-based reputation system for mailers using the Sender ID authentication method—not to be confused with e-mail deliverability firm Return Path’s Sender Score Certified program.
The information was obtained through interviews with the postmaster teams at the various e-mail inbox providers, according to Pivotal Veracity.
“For a good mailer, this is terrific news because it means reputation is now attached to the domain they authenticate with,” said Baird. “The implication of this is that if I send some mail through my e-mail service provider, and I send some mail through my in-house system, and I do a partnership mailing through a third party, my deliverability is going to be based on the reputation of my domain [the sender’s Web address].”
E-mailers’ reputations—or their propensity to send unwanted messages—are assessed for the most part by a combination of three metrics: the number of spam complaints they get, the number of spam traps they hit and the number of unknown users, or nonexistent addresses, they attempt to send mail to.
An e-mailer’s reputation is akin to a credit score and, like a credit score, a damaged reputation can take time to clean up. Mailers with damaged e-mail reputations can experience significant e-mail delivery troubles.
Currently, most Internet service providers track e-mailers’ reputations by the sending IP addresses, or the numerical designations for the devices sending the messages.
As a result, e-mail service providers have correctly advised their clients to send different types of e-mail from different IPs—for example, marketing messages, which tend to draw higher spam complaint rates, from one IP or set of IPs, and transactional messages, such as shipping confirmations, from another.
Under IP-based reputation monitoring, e-mail coming from the same marketer, but from different IPs, can have different reputations.
Under domain-based reputation monitoring, all authenticated e-mail from a given company has the same reputation.
The good news is that marketers who have authenticated their e-mail servers and who implement e-mail best practices, such as never sending e-mail to recipients who haven’t given explicit permission, can carry their good reputations with them when they switch e-mail service providers or when they start using new IP addresses.
“As you scale, for instance, and start incorporating more mail servers, and adding new IP addresses, your reputation is being attached to the domain, not to a particular IP,” said Baird. “So you don’t have to worry about issues such as having to warm up a new IP to avoid looking like a spammer.”
Warming up a new IP address is currently a common practice where the sender mails small amounts of e-mail through the new IP and slowly builds volume to avoid getting messages blocked by inbox providers, such as Yahoo, who don’t allow large volumes of incoming mail from previously unknown IPs.
However, marketers must authenticate their e-mail in order to benefit from domain-based reputation scoring. E-mail authentication refers to the various schemes the inbox providers use to determine whether or not incoming e-mail is really from who the sender says it’s from. Authentication’s aim is to head off messages from scammers who send e-mail from forged domains.
If a marketer’s messages aren’t authenticated, the ISPs can’t accurately assess a domain’s reputation.
As a result, according to Pivotal Veracity, for companies who haven’t authenticated their e-mail servers, Yahoo, and AOL will default to IP-based reputation monitoring.
“None of this is applicable if you’re not authenticating,” said Baird. “You can’t do domain-based reputation without authentication. The ISPs are implementing them in combination with one another.”
Also, according to Pivotal Veracity, Comcast is investigating domain-based reputation monitoring, but hasn’t implemented it. Road Runner is also investigating the scheme, according to Pivotal Veracity.
