Yahoo blocks unauthenticated PayPal and eBay Mail

Yahoo announced this morning that over the course of the next few weeks Yahoo would roll out a new feature to their email that blocks any unauthenticated email from eBay and PayPal.
In a blog post Nikki Dugan says:

Our weapon is a technology Yahoo! spearheaded called DomainKeys, which uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. In overly simplified terms, if the email’s originating domain ain’t really eBay.com or PayPal.com, it ain’t going through.

DomainKeys / Domain Keys Internet Mail have seen steady adoption by senders and receivers over the last few years. As more and more companies are signing outgoing mail, more and more receivers can make delivery decisions based on those signatures. This is the first time a sender and a receiver have announced an agreement that all non-signed email will be rejected.
Hat tip: Matt

Related Posts

Consent and laws

Derek Harding wrote an article at ClickZ talking about consent and how the email marketing industry hasn’t yet learned that consent is important.

Read More

Think about that subject line

Ken Magill talks about a study done by People magazine on the importance of subject lines and from lines in getting recipients to open and act on an email.
MailChimp has specific open information about mail sent through their application. They describe the collection of the information used in this blog post.
Recipients really do make open / not-open decisions based just on the visible subject line. MailChimp’s data shows that “boring” subject lines often perform better than pushier more sales like subject lines. One possible explanation is that recipients are used to ignoring spam subject lines, and the more informative a subject line, the more likely it is to be mail they actually open.

Read More

IP Reputation Portability

Matt posted a discussion of the portability of IP reputation over at his EmailKarma blog.
I have heard about Hotmail/MSN’s claim that if you add your new IPs to your SPF/SenderID record and send from your old IPs that your old IP reputation will transfer to your new IPs. I’ve not heard it working in practice, but it really can’t hurt to add your new IPs to your records as soon as you know what they are.

Read More