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April 19, 2007 FEATURE EDITORIALBanding Together to Improve Online TrustUpwards of 90 percent of today’s spam and deceptive email is forged and spoofed, reveals a recent study. Microsoft Corp. published results culminating from a two-year-long study on the effectiveness of Sender ID email authentication in helping counter deceptive email. Key findings include:
Authentication and Online Trust SummitThe results of the study were announced at the third annual Authentication and Online Trust Summit taking place this week in Boston. In early 2004 a group of business, industry and marketing leaders banded together to pursue solutions to authenticate email and improve user confidence. Putting rivalries aside, www.emailauthentication.org was established with the goal of improving trust and confidence in electronic messaging, the Internet and eCommerce. “There was a need in the industry for actionable and prescriptive advice,” says Craig Spiezle, executive director of the newly named Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) and the director of Microsoft technology care and safety. Since its inception that need has not diminished, but has instead amplified with recent escalating and evolving threats. “With today’s spoofing, zero-day exploits and image spam -- the need remains for actionable advice that can be immediately deployed to help both ISPs and corporations protect their employees and their domains. And on the other side of the spectrum, marketers are struggling with deliverability.” Email performance is threatened by double-digit non-deliverability rates as ISPs and consumers work to filter out the increased volume of SPAM and fraudulent messages. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) announced this week the launch of its Email Authentication Help Center, which is designed to assist email marketers to comply with the DMA Board of Directors‚ mandate requiring DMA members to authenticate all outbound email. “The Help Center simplifies the email authentication process, which many organizations find daunting or complex,” said Pat Kachura, senior vice president, ethics and consumer affairs for DMA. “In addition, the Center raises awareness about why DMA’s email authentication requirement makes good business sense, and how authentication builds consumer trust.” The DMA believes marketers that use the Help Center to authenticate email, can protect their brands, distinguish themselves from spammers and phishers, and ensure that their email reaches their intended recipients. Adoption Taking HoldSender ID has enjoyed a three-fold increase in adoption, accelerating to 8 million domains worldwide in just under a year. Microsoft says this technology is helping realize the promise established by the industry and government agencies to improve trust and confidence in email communications for consumers and marketers alike. At the summit last night, the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) announced the winners of its first annual Online Safety Leadership Awards. The winners all demonstrated a commitment to preserving and improving consumer trust in online channels. Spiezle says that email authentication via the Sender ID Framework (SDIF) or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is providing tangible business value to brands and users alike and was a baseline requirement for the Leadership Awards program. Nominations were received from a wide selection of Fortune 500 companies, technology providers, non-profits, industry associations, telecommunication providers and financial services. The judging process involved due diligence and research into reputation and best practices and an intense scoring system. Award categories spanned various sectors. The categories and winners include:
The summit, held April 18 and April 19, attracted over 450 attendees including representatives from Disney, American Express, Procter and Gamble, Bank of America, PayPal, among others, as well as international visitors from Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Poland, UK and Canada. Plans for the 2008 summit are underway. Look for presentations from the summit to be available early next week, posted on the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance site. Learn MoreDMA’s Email Authentication Resource Center includes definitions, how-tos, test-tools, and a checklist to help marketers make sense of the information requirements. Go here for a complete copy of the Microsoft study. Go here for more on DomainKeys Identified Mail. Go here for more on Microsoft Sender ID. Read previous Messaging News stories: Building a Solid Email Reputation: Understanding Authentication, Reputation and Accreditation January/February 2007 Email Authentication Myths and Misconceptions March/April 2006 The Urgent Need to Implement Authenticated Email January/February 2006 Losing EmailsThe current White House scramble to locate and provide historical emails for legal discovery is also a common and growing problem for U.S. businesses, reveals a new survey conducted by Osterman Research Inc. The survey, conducted this month and sponsored by MessageOne, a provider of managed services for email management, archive, and business continuity, strongly suggests that corporate email storage and retrieval is not well managed. Given the increasing legal requests for email, the study shows businesses and management might be at risk. The email practices survey includes interviews with employees working in medium and large sized U.S. businesses around the country. According to survey findings, the average employee sends and receives some 170 emails a day, while at work. Further, 33 percent of them use personal email accounts, at least once or twice a week, for business purposes and of those 17 percent do so every day. Interestingly, 15.7 percent of respondents admitted to using their personal email to avoid corporate review or retention of their messages. The survey also reveals that when the corporate email system goes down, 60 percent of employees use a personal email account to conduct business communications. According to Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, when employees conduct business through outside email accounts, it leaves businesses with no formal email record and vulnerable to all sorts of risk. “These survey results reinforce the critical need to have reliable email continuity in place to eliminate the need for employees to resort to outside email,” says Osterman. IN THE NEWSMessaging News Case Study Brief:IDC recently predicted that in 2007, the amount of digital information would surpass the storage capacity available. In the business world, email is one of the biggest culprits - more messages with bigger attachments are putting a huge strain on corporate servers and leading to lost productivity, as workers spend more time searching for information. That’s why Director of Infrastructure for Cowen and Company Steven Grundblatt, decided his company needed to take action and manage their email storage issues. But instead of managing all of these tasks in-house, he turned to Fortiva for email archiving help. “Storage is cheap – but managing it isn’t,” says Grundblatt. “As a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution, Fortiva struck the perfect balance by allowing us to have control over important things like our policy enforcement, supervision tools for compliance, legal discovery search, and mailbox management. At the same time, Fortiva’s experts deal with our growing storage requirements and data security for our archives – two things for which they have a level of expertise in that we could never expect to achieve in house.” Earlier this month, Fortiva announced that over 40 enhancements had been made to the Fortiva Archiving Suite over the past 6 months. With the product improvements, Fortiva believes they are the only SaaS email archive that meets a full complement of archiving needs, including email storage management with attachment stubbing, advanced search for legal discovery, and compliance with supervision and retention requirements. We welcome your ideas and your news for Messaging Newswire’s News & Trends in Email Security. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to sjordan@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Stephanie Jordan. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. For marketing information on this newsletter or other Messaging News products contact jvictor@messagingnews.com |
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