September 2009

When Authentic Isn’t Real

Our Truemark service relies on email authentication (SPF/Sender ID or DomainKeys/DKIM) as a foundation for verifying legitimate messages. And there are some email services out there that indicate with an icon whether a message has passed authentication. But is email authentication by itself enough? Nope (you knew that was coming). Email authentication only tells me that the message really came from the entity who claimed to send it. That works great when someone pretending to be a bank uses the bank’s email address – the authentication will fail and the message can be dropped so consumers never see it. But what if [...]

iconixtruemark2009-09-25T15:51:10-04:00September 25th, 2009|Email Authentication, Iconix Truemark Service|

A Rose By Any Other Name…

We mark thousands of domains in our Truemark service, representing more than 1700 companies. One of our biggest challenges (which is shared by companies themselves) is keeping up with all the domains used to send email. Most consumers would assume that email is sent from the main corporate domain (e.g., company.com), but that’s not the case. In reality, while there may be one main front door for web visits, there are usually many side doors (and windows, and vents, and…) for sending email. It varies by company: Large multinationals usually have domains tied to specific countries (e.g., company.co.uk, company.ca, company.fr) [...]

iconixtruemark2017-01-07T17:35:30-05:00September 25th, 2009|Consumers and Email, Email Marketing|

“Classic” Use of Email

We have an ongoing study with approximately 10,000 users that allows us to see how they interact with email at a macro level (anonymously of course). One of the interesting items we track in the study is which email program people are using. There are the obvious top-level major webmail and standalone clients – AOL/AIM webmail, Earthlink, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail along with Outlook Express and Outlook 2003/2007 – but we can also determine the particular subtype, which yields some interesting insight. Most webmail programs offer full-featured versions that are richer in graphics, chat links and companion [...]

iconixtruemark2017-01-07T17:35:31-05:00September 25th, 2009|Consumers and Email|

Visual ID for Email – Find What You Want at a Glance

There are two major value propositions for users of the Truemark service: find what you want and know that it’s real. Last week we announced our latest step in improving the user experience in email – use of favicons to visually identify messages in the inbox (see press release here). Prior to favicons we used either a company logo or a generic “check-lock” to highlight legitimate messages. In July we started displaying senders’ favicons in the inbox, which allows consumers to identify the sender of the message at a glance. It’s a compact way to distinguish messages in an easily [...]

iconixtruemark2017-01-07T17:35:31-05:00September 25th, 2009|Iconix Truemark Service|