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Beginners Guide

Lesson 4, Authentication and Prevention

[Beginners guide to Deliverability] Lesson 4, Authentication and prevention

Lesson 4, Authentication and prevention

As discussed in Lesson 1, the history of email, Deliverability is forever developing, not only to suit how people are intereacting with email but also to try and prevent some of the attacks that threaten ESPs, ISPs and their consumers.

One of the burning questions with email is, how do we know this email is from who it says its from, how do we know if this is a legitimate email?

Luckily for us, there are ways in which we can obtain this information and this is vital for us to have confidence in the knowledge that our emails are authenticated.

There are several types of authentication, to name the most commonly known ones they are:

SPF
DKIM
Sender ID
DMARC

Below i shall briefly describe how they work to authenticate emails and prevent the attacks mentioned in Lesson 3.

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 3, Security threats and Cyber attacks

Lesson 3, Security threats and Cyber attacks

Most of the time when talking about email, email marketing, deliverability or i’m explaining my work to my family, the first thing that is mentioned is the word ‘Spam’.
Spam

Why is this and how does the phrase come about?

You’d think that Spam is a fake meat per se, this would be a great term to coin for those annoying acquisition based emails you receive, well it’s not directly because of this. The actual term dates back to 1970, whereby there is a famous sketch by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In this sketch, based in a restaurant; some customers float in, and then you have vikings singing in the corner, the waitress comes over and then it all descends into mayhem, everything on the menu is with spam, and everyone in the room is singing ‘Spam’ drowning out the the other conversations.

You can watch the scene here.

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 2, the beginning of Commercial email

Lesson 2, the beginning of Commercial email

Now we start to discover the initial beginnings of commercial email. Please note that there are many ISPs not mentioned here, however i shall endeavor to cover them in my blog postings along the line, the major players are mentioned as key points of reference. I found a really cool infographic regarding the history of commercial email.

In 1988 Steve Dorner developed Eudora the first commercial product to be widely used for reading and sending email on local area networks (LANs)

A year later in 1989 Compuserve and MCI mail become first formally sanctioned email carriers connected to the internet (1989)

1991, Ray Ozzie and Mitch Kapor released a major version of Lotus Notes (2.0)

1992, Microsoft releases Microsoft Outlook their answer to Lotus Notes.

In 1993, AOL brought out an ISP, which was accessible internet based email system by this time there were 7 million users.

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Brazil to create secure email service; impact?

I recently retweeted about plans to create a secure email service in Brazil,

what implications could this have to those sending to this ISP? i asked myself. The article from the BBC is a good source to start from, but then what about those insecure external sources sending communications to this new email service?

There are some strong stories of late in the media in regards to security threats, snooping and of others obtaining secure information, one of those being the NSA.

So what can we expect?

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 1, the history of email

Lesson 1, the history of email

Electronic mail, commonly referred to as email or e-mail since 1993, is the method of exchanging messages from a sender to the receiver on a network, generally the internet.

The first email was sent in 1971 by a man called Raymond Tomlinson over the ARPANET. He implemented the first email system that sent an electronic message from one computer to another, in doing so he also coined the ‘@’ symbol to seperate the user name from the senders domain, which has been used ever since.

The ARPANET is famous for securely transferring protected military files between networks. As the ARPANET expanded from 4 research labs to several others, different models of computers were connected, thus creating compatability issues.
The solution was a set of protocols now referred to as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) this was designed in 1982.

ray_tomlinson

 

 

 

 

 

Raymond Tomlinson was also deeply involved in services needed to send emails over networks, these services included;
Mail Transport Agent (MTA) to move emails between machines, setting a standard format for email messages and designing a tool for creating and reading messages.

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10 quick wins for responsive email design tailored for your audience

1) Use the information provided via the user at sign up, such as which device they usually open emails with or via your ESP reporting
2) Use the media query (@media) to adapt styling for smart phone environments
3) Determine the width and height of the smartphones you are targetting
4) Experiment with subject line length and pre header text for mobile environments
5) Ensure to check renderability in each environment prior to sending campaigns to ensure compatability
6) Aswell as checking if the email is renderable ensure the syntax of your code is correct here
7) Check your inbox placement rates with your new creatives before sending your campaign
8) After adapting your creative check that your opens and click through rates are consistant for each ISP/platform post campaign
9) Ensure to include an Add to safe sender email address in your creative
10) Add yourself to the seed list to ensure you receive the live campaign in each of the Mobile environments

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