A Look Ahead: 2007 Market Trends

by George Schlossnagle, Co-Founder & VP of Engineering, Message Systems

As we fast-forward through 2007, it is apparent that ISPs will add ammo to counter phishing attacks, spoofing and other bad email behaviors. We expect to see three major trends take shape this year in the fight to prevent spam.

• Adoption of authentication technology - The rise of authentication technology, such as DomainKeys, DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and Microsoft SenderID, enables ISPs to verify the identity of senders to reduce phishing, spoofing and spam. Yahoo, Gmail and Earthlink already use DomainKeys. Hotmail uses SenderID. AOL and others will choose one of these technologies in 2007. Authentication technology enables ISPs to take a variety of actions, from throttling, to marking email with an “open with caution” notation, to an outright block. Effective authentication technology is the long-missing block in reputation technologies, allowing receivers to ensure that they are applying the correct policy to the correct entity. Similarly, authentication technologies provide a mechanism for senders to protect their corporate identity from fraud, misuse and phishing by providing receivers a means to validate the source of the message or message content. In the coming year this will translate into more senders using one or more authentication technologies to protect their communications and the continued emergence of domain-name based reputation systems in addition to their traditional IP based brethren.
• ISPs jump on the Goodmail CertifiedEmail bandwagon - ISPs will increasingly embrace Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail service for two compelling reasons: it transforms customer email from a cost center to a revenue center (Goodmail shares the token signing payment with ISPs for each email they accept) and reduces mail processing costs (CertifiedEmail bypasses all but user-level filters).
  For senders with a good reputation and authenticated sending practices, employing Goodmail’s certification service provides brand awareness and protection as well as ultimate deliverability.
• Widespread use of reputation data - Both anti-spam vendors and ISPs have been collecting data on the global sending practices of companies for years. The ease of email address spoofing has meant that traditionally only IP-based data was useful to these players. Because it is easy for an abusive sender to change IP addresses, this methodology is an incomplete solution – primarily effective against botnets and senders who are trying to do the right thing by keeping their IP addresses static. The rise of authentication technologies which tie a message’s sender to its content (i.e. DK, DKIM and Goodmail) allow receivers to now make black, grey and whitelisting decisions based on not only IP but on the domain mail is sent from. These changes to the reputation landscape increase the burden on senders to keep their mailing practices ‘clean’, but also offer much more robust whitelisting capabilities to receivers.

As ISPs do more to protect their customers from spam, phishing and spoofing this year, it will become increasingly imperative for legitimate senders to develop strategies on authentication and reputation management to ensure their email messages make it through to the inbox.

		George Schlossnagle, Co-founder and Vice President of Engineering George brings extensive knowledge and real-world experience managing large enterprise environments and live-data tuning to Message Systems. Before co-founding the company in 1997, he was lead systems administrator at iVillage. He also served as Director of Operations and principal architect of technical changes at Community Connect, Inc., where he helped increase traffic 100-fold and vaulted the company into the top five Nielsen ranked sites in member loyalty. George is an internationally recognized expert in the PHP language, has published numerous technical articles and a critically acclaimed book on the topic, and is a frequent speaker at industry events such as INBOX. Before pursuing his career, he served as a teacher in the Peace Corps for two years and earned an M.A. degree in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and a Sc.M. degree in mathematics from Brown University.

in this issue

• A Look Ahead: 2007 Market Trends
• Controlling Messaging Costs

case profiles

• Improving Email Bounce Rates by 2.5% (pdf)
• 95% Email Deliverability (pdf)

current news

• January 11, 2007
  Online job search site Dice rolls sixes with Message Systems e-mail
• January 9, 2007
  Dice Selects Message Systems to Improve Email Deliverability
• December 19th, 2006
  The ROI Behind Deliverability: Best Practices That Maximize Returns

upcoming events

• Marketing Sherpa Email Summit
  March 4th-6th
  Miami, FL
• DMA Webinar “95% Email Deliverability"
  April 5th
• Windows Live Hotmail:
  Insights for Marketers, April 17th Boston, MA
• Email Authentication Summit
  April 18th-19th
  Boston, MA
• Inbox
  May 31st-June 1st
  San Jose, CA

7070 Samuel Morse Drive
Suite 150
Columbia, MD 21046
Phone: 410-872-4910 x312
Toll Free: (877) 887-3031 x312
Fax: 410-872-4912
messagesystems.com