Email Authentication Shindig at the Federal Trade Commission   - 1,926 Views, 1 Comment

As many of you may already know, the Federal Trade Commission has been charged with looking at, among other things, sender authentication. This is important because when certain sorts of email marketers send out their “permission based email marketing”, for some reason they don’t actually send it from their own machines, or even in their own names.

Sender authentication is one effective tool to help addresss that situation, by having legitimate senders identify the IP addresses and mail servers which are actually allowed to send email with their name attached. This identification happens transparently, during each email transaction.

However the industry seems unable to agree on just whose authentication protocol should be used. Should it be SPF? Microsoft Sender I.D.? Yahoo Domain Keys? All three? None of the above?

Well, if you are on the edge of your seat waiting to find out what is going to happen next in the authentication wars, hie theeself over to the Federal Trade Commission’s “Email Authentication Summit” next week, November 9th and 10th, at the FTC Conference Center in Washington, D.C..

However, in the meantime, and as always, Aunty’s strong recommendation is that you publish SPF records, and shortly Aunty will be telling you where you can get step-by-step directions for doing just that.

You can read more about this here.