Intellicontact Pro's monthly newsletter came this morning, and with it important information on another obstacle to getting your message to customers.

Microsoft's SenderID initiative, which isn't exactly backed by the industry (but as usual, they're going forward with it) will be going live in October 2005. Here's the info:


Thank you Intellicontact Pro for getting word out to your customers.

, are you handling this internally?

I have no idea what that even means.

It's an initiative that Microsoft and others in the industry undertook to combat spam. It's a new way for servers to identify whether a domain is "trusted". By adding the information I posted to the domain records, a user sending an email to an @msn or @hotmail email account will be identified and the email will be allowed into the users' inbox.

Without it, hotmail and msn users will not see your email.

will need to add this to our domain records, I believe, since I don't think we have access to it. Is this correct, or do we need to do this at the registrar level?

More info here:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/tec...id/default.mspx
http://senderid.espcoalition.org/

How does this pertain to an order confirmation when a customer places a cart order?

That's a really good question. ? This is important.

Hello,

I will post more details in the near future but we will get this taken care of

Thank you!

Can you tell me if the domain record part is handled on your end or at the individual [site's] registrar level?

Hi!

We're going to have the System Admins look into this and see what needs to be done. Please let us know if you have any further questions. Thanks BrianR

Thanks Brian. I didn't realize there was an actual deadline announced by M$; when I saw that article today, I got real nervous.

Anything new here?

Thanks!

Skipper,

Anything new here?

Thanks.

To catch everyone up to speed on this thread, Microsoft is putting in new non-industry standard methods of email scanning on their Hotmail and MSN services. This is for the benefit of their clients, to a large degree to prevent Spam, which as you may know is a worldwide problem. However, the problem is that in order for legitimate businesses and sites to not be blocked, they have to reconfigure systems and add a new automated line or two to the email headers attached to outgoing email. I couldn't agree more. However, we are still going to address the issue. I believe that even before it was mentioned here on the forums, that our internal team was already reviewing the procedures involved.

This process is being handled by our system administration team and I was still waiting for a bit of detailed feedback before I post on this subject. Let me assure you that every possible step that can be taken within these guidelines set forth by Microsoft will be reviewed and addressed as soon as possible, most likely by the deadline. You will hear from either myself or Skipper very soon.

Thank you for your patience.

Thank you for the update James. I know trying to keep up w/M$'s whims is a job all itself. Unfortunately they have the market power to do basically anything they want.

I'm sure the admin folks there realize how many of our customers use hotmail and msn accounts, so while it may be a pain in the.... as of October 2005 our customers will not receive emails from any mo*ster merchant without the domain changes.

Thanks James for the update!

Any update on this one?
Thanks
Dave

I don't have much in the way of updated information on this one. This was dicussed briefly during the tech support department meeting yesterday and I personally learned a bit more about the actual MSN initiative. The whispered rumor was that AOL was also jumping on the same boat and going to use the same settings.

Other than that the information was passed that this will most likely be fixed ahead of the deadline. The changes necssary need to be made to a site's DNS record and these changes are in the works on our side. There is nothing that clients need to do on your end to meet these new requirements.

Thank you!

Maybe I just don't know enough about email systems, but how would this stop spammers? Wouldn't they just do the same thing?

Everything I've read on the web says that the SenderID framework is now in place for all Microsoft-based domains (@msn, @hotmail), and if there is no ID from the server sending the message, the message will not reach the user.

And now I see Yahoo has it's own authentication scheme for their email users (@yahoo), called DomainKeys.

Where is the technical team on this, and will the insanity ever stop?

Anyone having trouble getting messages through to msn or hotmail accounts?

Anything new here?

Thanks.

Was this ever resolved?

Thanks.

I'm curious too.

And still waiting....

OK, now I'm getting upset. I've had about 10 emails bounced in the last 2 days to AOL accounts, and can only guess that it's because the email servers aren't configured properly in regards to the new email initiatives.

Please, now that its affecting my business (as I knew it would, which is why I posted this topic on 8/30/05), please address the issue.

Thank you.

Edited: I found this information on an AOL email policy that may provide a clue:
The Sender Policy Framework

Edit2: I did a reverse DNS lookup on my site's IP address (I'm assuming the mail server resides under the same IP), and it failed with the following note:

Failure! Unfortunately we were unable to resolve Reverse DNS for the IP address you entered. Contact your ISP or e-mail administrator to modify these settings. Also please note the following points:

AOL does require that all connecting Mail Transfer Agents have established reverse DNS, regardless of whether it matches the domain.

Reverse DNS must be in the form of a fully-qualified domain name. Reverse DNSes containing in-addr.arpa are not acceptable, as these are merely placeholders for a valid PTR record. Reverse DNSes consisting only of IP addresses are also not acceptable, as they do not correctly establish the relationship between domain and IP address.

Hello Chris,
I did receive your tech ticket and have forwarded it to our system operations team. They should be able to have this resolved for you soon. If you have any further questions regarding this, feel free to update the ticket you created on this issue.
Thanks!
Matt

Any news on this subject? I did a test this morning sending a message from Intellecontact to my hotmail account and it went into the Spam Folder because it stated "The sender of this message, dani at etoolcart.com, could not be verified by Sender ID."

So our messages are still not being received by hotmail account holders. The weird thing is that although my legit email got flagged as spam my regular inbox was filled with From and Subjects like

MaXxXL0ads Sh00t L0ads Like a Cannon
h0rNyFemale lets screwAround
BoredH0useWife L00kinForSomeCock

I kid you not. How can this type of message get through SenderId and my legitament and clean message can not!! Amazing

.... when can we expect the necessary information to be posted on our DNS servers.

Anyone??? ? Is there a solution. This is hurting our email campaigns.

Hi All-

I'm fairly certain this was applied to our systems several months ago. I will double check and update you. However, this would only apply to MonsterCommerce email (via Imail), if you are using Intellicontact, they would be responsible for this issue. I would recommend contacting their support here.

Thanks

Brian

Thanks for answering. I will contact Intellicontact

Dani,

I am also opening a support ticket from your account and have our systems operations department double check to make sure the SPF records were correctly added.

Thanks