New Delivery Authentication Technology Rising in Popularity

DomainKeys, OpenSPF and Sender ID – if you don’t know what these things are, find out fast! Mail server authentication, both from a marketing and corporate admin standpoint, will become a necessary defense in the spam war.  It is estimated that only 30 percent of mail servers currently use these email authentication technologies, but this number will grow quickly as email marketers rush to take advantage of technology that will help distinguish actual email from spam.
 
Review and commit these terms and definitions to memory.

DomainKeys
DomainKeys is an e-mail authentication system designed to verify the domain of an email sender and evaluate the message integrity.  Simply stated, it verifies the sender’s domain name, confirms the message hasn’t been altered somewhere along the line, matches the "from" address to the sender's domain name to sniff our forgeries, and traces the message back to the sender's domain name.

This particular form of email authentication is valuable because it positively identifies the sender’s domain, which makes domain-based blacklists and whitelists more effective. It also allows abusers to be identified more easily. 

OpenSPF
A large problem in the complicated world of SPAM is the use of fake or forged sender addresses. The innocent marketers who fall victim to forgery pay heavy consequences for this stealthy activity.  Sender Policy Framework (or SPF) protects the envelope sender address, which is used for the delivery of messages and is often not seen by the receiver.

Sender ID
Sender ID is another authentication tool that is built on the idea of verifying the domain name from which email messages are sent. It validates the origin of a message by checking the IP address of the sender against the owner of the sending domain. Using this tool requires that e-mail senders and domain owners publish or declare all of the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses used by their outbound e-mail servers, or the IPs authorized to send e-mail on their behalf, in the Domain Name System (DNS).

Gold Lasso uses all three of these technologies already, but don’t be surprised if the FTC made these a mandatory practice as part of compliance with the CAN SPAM Act.