Inbox Insights

Email Authentication: Don't Wait

The movement's been slow and steady, but we're now seeing the rewards: 50 percent of legitimate e-mail is authenticated, using either SenderID/SPF or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), according to a new study from the Authentication and Online Trust Authority (AOTA).

Have you taken the simple steps to have your e-mail and brand protected by using authentication? If not, why not? It's simple to do, and there's no downside if you follow all the steps correctly.

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Five Tips for Building Better Segments

One key lesson we've learned about e-mail marketing over years is this: One size does not fit all. The more relevant your messages are to your subscribers' needs, wants, and expectations, the better the response and deliverability.

In order to create relevant messages you must be able to create good segments from your house list. Further, good segments require good information collected from subscribers when they sign up.

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Yahoo Declares War on Zombies

Yahoo gave e-mail deliverability a New Year's gift. It publicized the fact it uses Spamhaus blocklists to stop three sources of spam and is taking up arms against the global army of spam-spewing zombies (define).

You might think Yahoo telling us it intends to find even more ways to block our unwanted messages isn't much of a gift. And nothing gets the average marketer's back up faster than a blocklist, which lists IP addresses, domains, or senders suspected of spamming.

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Hotmail's People Factor Sets the Rules

We usually think of spam filtering as a highly automated function that fends off the millions of spam messages trying to force their way into inboxes. Yet even the most sophisticated spam filters have a human component, often a network of e-mail users who click the "this is spam" button in their e-mail interfaces or vote on a message's spamminess through services such as Cloudmark.

Microsoft's Hotmail takes the people factor one step further with a little-known but highly valued panel of humans who tell Microsoft whether they believe an e-mail message is spam or not.

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