1)
From name is not always displayed
AOL only shows users the from address, not the from name.
Therefore what if you have a from address with the domain
part made up of your email
service provider? Clearly your average recipient is
going to be suspicious of this type of email address, particularly
as they have been told by AOL so many times in the media
about phishing emails.
Also
if you have an email address such as no-reply@yourdomain.com
it is hardly a warm and inspiring address that encourages
them to open the email.
2)
Email client whitelists
Most major email clients & web-based email providers
give their users the opportunity to “whitelist”
addresses with a click of a button. This prevents this address
being filtered as junk mail and ensures images are displayed.
Adding your address to their address book will also achieve
this in numerous email clients. Clearly then if you keep
changing your address, or if your supplier dynamically generates
an address each time the clients whitelisting will fail.
3)
Domain Blacklisting
It is not just IP addresses that can get blacklisted but
whole domains. It is unlikely that your domain will ever
get blacklisted if you are sending genuine permission based
emails. However your supplier who is sending millions of
emails a day through there ‘From’ domain they
make you use could be blacklisted. Therefore make sure you
choose email marketing software that enables you to put
any address in.
In addition
other similar domains could cause your email to be rejected.
For example an Emailcenter client was using a .org.uk domain.
An overseas spammer who was blacklisted owned the same .org
domain. The blacklists filtering rules did not distinguish
between .org and .org.uk domains and therefore rejected
the email. Upon contact with the blacklist owner the blocking
was immediately rectified.
4)
Spam filter scoring
Spam filters use your from address as a means of determining
how likely it is that you are a spammer. For example these
types of addresses might be frowned upon by some filters:
- noreply@domain.com
- 12345@domain.com
- sales@domain.com
These
are typical of a spammers address and therefore treated
as such by the filters.
5)
Sender ID Records
No doubt you will have received a phishing email in the
past from somewhere claiming to be your bank and asking
for your login details. Surprisingly these emails get results
for the senders and people do hand over their login details
that get abused.
Therefore
ISP’s are keen to find ways of filtering these emails.
As most phishing attacks mask the from address so it looks
like it has been sent from the real bank, one method is
to check that the server sending the email is the same server
that holds the domain. This in itself is a crude method
as all large organisations have systems that send email
from outside of their domain. A typical example of this
would be order confirmations from the clients e-commerce
server.
Therefore
a technology called Sender ID has developed and is used
by the likes of Hotmail. Sender ID is a record that any
company can publish that lists what IP addresses are allowed
to send email using their domain in the from address. ISP’s
can then check any email they receive to see if the from
domain matches the IP addresses held in their Sender ID
record.
Not
all email that fails this check gets junked but it does
add to your spam score and make your email more likely to
get junked.
