Email Authentication Use, Stats From the Experts
While far from solved, there is hope on the horizon for email deliverability problems. Authentication methods are more and more becoming the norm. (Discussion by ClickZ Kevin Newcomb is here.) They’re expected to be followed later by increased use of reputation methods.
Email marketing gurus Loren MacDonald and Kirill Popov discuss the trends and the distinction here. They describe the two major methods thus:
“Where authentication methods like SIDF and DKIM verify that a sender is who they say they are, reputation services take that sender’s identity and check it against a database of their sending practices, checking for things like bounce rates, unsubscribe practices and user complaints.”
In the article, the authors state that authentication is up 60% in the last year. Also, that:
“35 percent of all Internet e-mail is authenticated using SenderID framework (SIDF), a protocol identified with Microsoft.” Also, that “10 percent of all Internet e-mail uses Yahoo!-developed DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).”
That’s good news, but the battle will be uphill if some of their other statistics are accurate. They write, “10 of every 12 messages tracked by the Postini Threat Identification Network is spam.” Also, that “At the recent E-mail Authentication Summit, representatives from AOL and Microsoft stated 90-95 percent of all inbound e-mail they process is spam.”
Those numbers are considerably higher than others reported elsewhere. But despite what must be a large overhead on MSN’s and AOL’s servers, the fact they are trapping that many is a good thing. The alternative would be to have them wind up in the Inbox where they’d clutter up the genuine marketing messages from affiliates and merchants. (One of the problems with marketing is always the signal to noise ratio.)
So despite the many hurdles email marketing continues to face, its future looks better than ever.