TagAuthentication

Answers to your questions about the new Yahoo and Google technical requirements

On January 9th at 6pm GMT, 1pm EST and 10am PST I’ll be speaking with Nout Boctor-Smith of Nine Lives Digital about the new Yahoo and Google technical requirements. In this webinar you’ll: Learn more about what these new email sender guidelines entail and how they differ from the status quo  Understand why you’re being asked to do things that were previously handled by your...

Yahoogle Requirements Update

Since I wrote about it last month the requirements for bulk senders to Yahoo and Google have changed a little.

The big change is that bulk senders need to authenticate with both SPF and DKIM, rather than SPF or DKIM. Only one of those has to align with the 822 From: header.

Customer subdomain authentication

On Tuesday I wrote about using DNS wildcards to implement customer-specific subdomains for email authentication. As I said then, that approach isn’t perfect. You’d much prefer to have per-customer domain authentication, where each customer has their own DKIM d= and ideally their own SPF records, rather than having all customers sharing those records and relying on loose DMARC...

Wildcards and DKIM and DMARC, oh my!

If you’re an ESP with small customers you may have looked at the recent Google / Yahoo requirements around DMARC-style alignment for authentication and panicked a bit. Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.…For direct mail, the domain in the...

New Requirements for Bulk Senders

UPDATE: You need to authenticate with both DKIM and SPF. Google are circulating a new set of requirements for bulk senders on their blog. So are Yahoo. It’s almost like postmasters talk to each other or something. If you dig through the links in the Gmail blog post you can find this summary of what they’ll be requiring from bulk senders by February: Set up SPF or DKIM email...

Stop with the incorrect SPF advice

Another day, another ESP telling a client to publish a SPF include for the wrong domain. It shouldn’t annoy me, really. It’s mostly harmless and it’s just an extra DNS look up for most companies. Heck, we followed Mailchimp’s advice and added their include to our bare root domain and it’s not really a huge deal for companies with only a couple SaaS providers. Still...

Authentication at Office365

This is a followup from a post a few weeks ago about authentication changes at Office365. We have some more clarity on what is going on there. This is all best information we have right now. Microsoft is now requiring authentication to match the visible from address in order to reach the inbox at Office365. That means, either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain must align (in the DMARC sense) to...

Some Microsoft thoughts

Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec. The first is an extension of DMARC. They’re rolling out inbox flags for...

Cost of authentication

At the end of last year, Steve wrote a post about the different types of authentication. I thought I’d build on that and write about the costs associated with each type. While I know a lot of my readers are actually on the sending side, I’m also going to talk about the costs associated with the receiving side and a little bit about the costs for intermediaries such as CRM systems or...

Authentication

Some notes on some of the different protocols used for authentication and authentication-adjacent things in email. Some of this is oral history, and some of it may be contradicted by later or more public historical revision. SPF Associates an email with a domain that takes responsibility for it. Originally Sender Permitted From, now Sender Policy Framework. It allows a domain owner to announce...

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