A quick marketers guide to DKIM

J.D. Falk posted a brief but comprehensive guide to the different DKIM flags: what they mean and how they may affect delivery. (The original link seems to be dead so I reproduced the blog post for reference It’s just that good. A DKIM Primer Resurrected

DKIM only answers two questions:

  • Does the message have a valid signature?
  • If it does, what domain signed it?

The signing domain, identified by the d= tag in the DKIM signature header, is the only part of the DKIM signature where the choices you make now will directly affect the continued deliverability of your messages. This is because d= is how you tell the receiving system who you are.

J.D. goes on to describe the different flags and how they may affect delivery of a particular signed message. It’s a good review of the flags and what they mean.

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DKIM: what it's not

An ESP twittered this past week about their new DKIM implementation going live. They were quite happy with themselves. Unfortunately, in their blog post, they mentioned 3 things that DKIM would provide for their customers, and got it wrong on all 3 points. Their confusion is something that a lot of people seem to get wrong about DKIM so I thought I would explain what was wrong.

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DKIM implementation survey

DKIM has been a hot topic of discussion on some of my mailing lists today. One of the open questions is what is holding up adoption of DKIM. I have my own theories, but thought I’d throw out some questions to see how ESPs and ISPs are currently using domain based reputation.
I have set up two surveys one for ESPs and one for ISPs. Responses are anonymous.
I’ll collect responses for a week and share the results.

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DKIM implementation survey: prelim results

First off, I want to thank everyone who participated in the DKIM implementation survey. This week has been pretty hectic so far, so I haven’t had a chance to actually dig down into the data from the survey, but I thought I’d post some preliminary results.
The ESP survey had 45 respondents. 30% of those sent more than 15 million emails a month.
Of all the respondents: 40% are signing with Domain Keys, 51.1% are signing with DKIM.
Of all respondents: 79.5% are signing with Domain Keys and 78.8% are signing with DKIM to access services (whitelists or FBLs) provided by the ISPs.
50% of those not signing with Domain Keys are not doing so because customers have not requested it.  61% of those not signing with DKIM are not doing it because of technical difficulties with deployment.
The ISP survey had 16 respondents, with 37.5% handling less than 500,000 mailboxes and 18.8% handling more than 15 million mailboxes. 75% of respondents said they are not checking Domain Keys on inbound mail. 56% said they are not currently checking DKIM on inbound mail.
Only 10 ISPs answered the question if they plan to check either Domain Keys or DKIM.

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