We’ve all seen it happen, someone hijacks your domain name to send mass amounts of spam emails so that it looks like its coming from you and your business. With many email servers, this results in your domain being blacklisted from delivering email to those email addresses. So what do you do?

[ =1,2,3]

Yahoo! has a technology called “DomainKeys” that basically acts as a personal “handshake” between your server that is sending the email, and Yahoo that is receiving the email. It uses encryption technology to verify that an email is really from the domain from which it appears to be. If a message has been verified through DomainKeys, you’ll see a small icon of an envelope and key in the email header. It essentially verifies that the email is from the site that it claims to be from.

It’s also a good idea to manually double-check the From: field of an email message to make sure it really is from the person or domain that it claims to be from. For example, an email from Yahoo! is from “…@yahoo.com” and not from a spoof domain such as “…@y9ho00oo.com”).

• Will using DKIM improve my deliverability and guarantee that my marketing mail goes directly to the recipients’ inbox, bypassing any spam filters?

Whether this improves deliverability or bypasses filters is entirely at the discretion of the validating receivers. When a message has been signed using DKIM, a receiver uses their knowledge about the signer to determine the most appropriate treatment of the message. It is expected that messages from a signer who has a good reputation will be subject to less scrutiny by the receiver’s filters.

• What does a DKIM signature mean?

The owner of the domain name being used for a DKIM signature is declaring that they are accountable for the message. This means that their reputation is at stake.

Receivers who successfully validate a signature can use information about the signer as part of a program to limit spam, spoofing, phishing, or other undesirable behavior, although the DKIM specification itself does not prescribe any specific actions by the recipient.

If you primarily send newsletters out via a newsletter service such as Aweber then this may not be a huge concern as the deliverability of those emails is based upon the authentication of Aweber’s servers and not your own. However many hijackers can spam from your domain even if you don’t use it often causing unwanted spam with your name on it, which is generally not something you want to be associated with.

Read more about how to implement DomainKeys at dkim.org. [/ ]