MarketingSherpa Blog

AOL announced earlier this month that bulk senders who want to stay on its whitelist would have to start using a program called SPF (for Sender Policy Framework) to authenticate the email they send.

(If you’re not the email tech guru at your company, you should know that SPF is, at its most basic, a line of code that gets published in your Domain Name Server information. ISPs can look up that code to verify that you really are who you say you are and not a spoofer, phisher or forger who doesn’t have authority to use that email address.)

Industry publications began reporting that as an edict from AOL that bulk senders should start publishing their SPF records now or else get booted off the whitelist.

We asked AOL for the straight story. Here’s what Carl Hutzler, AOL’s anti-spam director told us:

“We are asking people already on our whitelist (and newcomers) to set-up SPF records to simply help the ‘management’ of the IP based whitelist. It has nothing to do with qualifying a person to be on our whitelist or negatively affecting their mail if they do not have SPF.

“SPF simply is a way to publish outbound mail server IP addresses, which is exactly what AOL needs to whitelist someone. Instead of a whitelisted organization having to update AOL every time an IP address changes (server gets shut down, returned on lease, etc.), if the organization uses SPF, they can maintain their own list of legit servers and AOL can query their SPF DNS record to get any updates (perhaps once a day or so).

“We do not have a timeframe for AOL to implement SPF on our inbound systems yet. End of summer is what we are targeting. But this has almost nothing to do with the whitelisting feature. We aim to begin using SPF in our whitelist update processes in the next month or so.”

You can get more information at AOL’s Postmaster page.

If even the anti-spammers can’t get their messages delivered to the right folder, what hope do the rest of us have?

Josh Carlson of InsuranceJournal.com sent us the following snippet after he got a cold call from Habeas, the haiku email-whitelisting service.

It was your typical sales call — sales rep tries to counter prospect’s utility and price objections — but the rep didn’t give up. She offered to email more information, which Josh agreed to accept. So far, so routine.

“Her email arrived a couple minutes later, landing in my spam box,” Josh said.

Raquel Hirsch is one happy Yahoo! Mail Plus customer today, because she and every other paying Mail Plus customer saw email storage capacity shoot up to 2GB, as Yahoo! said it would do over a month ago.

Freebie users also got a boost in storage capacity, from 4MB to 100 MB. Not close to Gmail’s vaunted 1GB of space, but enough to keep Yahoo! addresses from turning sour in your database quite as fast due to overcapacity.

“Wow! I never have to delete an email again!” Raquel told us. “Is this a good thing???”

Yahoo is betting that it is with an array of special features that appear geared toward keeping their Mail Plus customers, who paid $20 and up a year for premium service, from fleeing to Gmail.

Other bennies for Mail Plus customers:

— No more skyscraper ads crowding the inbox. Between the left-hand menu and the right-hand ads, the email got squeezed.

— A cleaned-up interface that’s a little easier to navigate (not that there was any real problem with the old one).

— One price: $19.99. Previously, Mail Plus users had to pay more to get more storage (50MB and up).

— Email search (another Gmail benefit).

Mail Plus customers already had more storage and a larger message size than free-mail users. They can send and receive email from any POP3 email address and their outbound messages don’t carry the viral Yahoo! ads.

At least one catch has emerged for people who want to sign up for Yahoo!’s expanded free service, though.

Chris Richardson of WebProNews said in an article today that after he signed up for a free account, he could not access his email unless he agreed to install Yahoo!’s companion toolbar.

A national Do Not Email registry that doesn’t authenticate email senders would not only fail to stop unsolicited commercial email but could even trigger more spam to consumers, the Federal Trade Commission said today in a mandated report to Congress.

“Without effective authentication of email,” the report said, “any registry is doomed to fail. With authentication, better CAN-SPAM Act enforcement and better filtering by ISPs may even make a registry unnecessary.”

Spammers, the FTC said, “would most likely use a registry as a mechanism for verifying the validity of email addresses and, without authentication, the commission would be largely powerless to identify those responsible for misusing the registry,” the commission warned.

The worst-case scenario comes with children’s email addresses. Although legitimate marketers could use the registry to keep from sending inappropriate mail to children, pedophiles, which the commission called “the Internet’s most dangerous users,” could use the same information to target children.

Instead, the FTC called for creating “widespread adoption” of email authentication standards that both government and ISPs could use to ID spammers.

The FTC would first allow private industry to come up with authentication standards, but if that didn’t happen, it said, the government could step in.

View the FTC’s report (in PDF) here.