Law firms and other clients using our email marketing software know that we stress deliverability, and to that end offer a host of advanced tools to maximize the deliverability of our law firms' email newsletters, alerts and invitations to their subscribers' inboxes.
One of our advanced tools is authentication. As defined in Wikipedia, email authentication is the process of equipping email messages with adequate verifiable information to allow recipients to confirm the identity of the sender and the authenticity of the message sent. Among other uses, authentication is intended to protect recipients against "phishing," that is, the fraudulent attempt by a sender to obtain sensitive information from a recipient by masquerading as a legitimate organization recognizable to the recipient.
Existing authentication protocols include SPF, Sender ID, and Domain Keys. To date, most ISPs have not done much with authentication data (Hotmail looks for Sender ID or SPF records, and Yahoo requires DomainKeys for feedback loop participation).
However, slowly, things are changing. Recently, Google's Gmail platform announced that to help eBay and Paypal combat "phishing," Gmail will reject messages that are not properly signed with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). This news represents a significant development in how receiving servers are using authentication data to determine whether or not to accept or reject emails. Our mail host partner predicts, and we agree, that Gmail and other ISP's are likely to expand their use of DKIM and other authentication protocols in the future. Quite possibly, the corporate domains to which B2B law firms send emails will follow suit. If this comes to pass, unauthenticated mail will be subject to much stronger spam filtering, and thus much more likely to be rejected.
What this means for law firms is that you should be working with an email services provider that offers authentication so that as more receiving servers start using authentication, you'll be set up to provide them with the information they need to identify your emails as legitimate.
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