Didier Grossemy - Digital Marketing Blog

Does your email marketing software includes SPF

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Article presented by:  Didier Grossemy | X2 Digital CEO

SPF is the breakthrough for sending emails from an external email technology (other than Outlook). This document is to make you understand the importance of setting up your SPF before starting sending emails.

Common Types of E-Mail Abuse where the Sender Address is Forged

Spammers want to avoid receiving non-delivery notifications (bounces) to their real addresses.
Fraudsters want to cover their tracks and remain anonymous.
Computer worms want to cause confusion or just don’t care about which sender addresses they use.
Phishers (password fishers) want to impersonate well-known, trusted identities in order to steal passwords from users.

The Problem: Sender Address Forgery

Today, nearly all abusive e-mail messages carry fake sender addresses. The victims whose addresses are being abused often suffer from the consequences, because their reputation gets diminished and they have to disclaim liability for the abuse, or waste their time sorting out misdirected bounce messages.

You probably have experienced one kind of abuse or another of your e-mail address yourself in the past, e.g. when you received an error message saying that a message allegedly sent by you could not be delivered to the recipient, although you never sent a message to that address.

Sender address forgery is a threat to users and companies alike, and it even undermines the e-mail medium as a whole because it erodes people's confidence in its reliability. That is why your bank never sends you information about your account by e-mail and keeps making a point of that fact.

But it does not have to be this way!

Sender Addresses in E-Mails

Like paper mail letters, e-mail messages have at least two kinds of sender addresses: one on the envelope and one in the letterhead.

The envelope sender address (sometimes also called the return-path) is used during the transport of the message from mail server to mail server, e.g. to return the message to the sender in the case of a delivery failure. It is usually not displayed to the user by mail programs.

The header sender address of an e-mail message is contained in the "From" or "Sender" header and is what is displayed to the user by mail programs. Generally, mail servers do not care about the header sender address when delivering a message.

The Solution: SPF

The Xmail (X2 Email marketing software) uses SPF standards.

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. More precisely, the current version of SPF — called SPFv1 or SPF Classic — protects the envelope sender address, which is used for the delivery of messages. See the box on the right for a quick explanation of the different types of sender addresses in e-mails.
(There are other solutions that protect the header sender address or that do not care at all about who sent the message, only who originally wrote it.)

Even more precisely, SPFv1 allows the owner of a domain to specify their mail sending policy, e.g. which mail servers they use to send mail from their domain. The technology requires two sides to play together:(1) the domain owner publishes this information in an SPF record in the domain's DNS zone, and when someone else's mail server receives a message claiming to come from that domain, then (2) the receiving server can check whether the message complies with the domain's stated policy. If, e.g., the message comes from an unknown server, it can be considered a fake.

Once you are confident about the authenticity of the sender address, you can finally "take it for real" and attach reputation to it. While IP-address-based reputation systems like Spamhaus or SpamCop have prevailed so far, reputation will increasingly be based on domains and even individual e-mail addresses in the future, too.

Furthermore, additional kinds of policies are planned for a future version of SPF, such as asserting that all of a domain's outgoing mail is S/MIME or PGP signed.

An Example Policy

Let's look at an example to give you an idea of how SPF works. Bob owns the domain example.net. He also sometimes sends mail through his GMail account and contacted GMail's support to identify the correct SPF record for GMail.Since he often receives bounces about messages he didn't send, he decides to publish an SPF record in order to reduce the abuse of his domain in e-mail envelopes:

example.net. TXT "v=spf1 mx a:pluto.example.net include:aspmx.googlemail.com -all"The parts of the SPF record mean the following: v=spf1 SPF version 1
mx the incoming mail servers (MXes) of the domain are authorized to also send mail for example.net

a:pluto.example.net the machine pluto.example.net is authorized, too
include:aspmx.googlemail.com everything considered legitimate by gmail.com is legitimate for example.net, too

-all all other machines are not authorized

This example demonstrates but a small part of SPF's expressiveness.

Do not take it as a guideline for building your own record — things might not work out as you expect and legitimate messages might get blocked! Instead, learn more about the record syntax, or get the complete picture by studying the full specification. Community support is available.

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Xmail (X2 Email Marketing software) has built in triggers to generate an SPF record.

Meaning that all you email communication will not end up in the spam box.

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Article presented by:  Didier Grossemy | X2 Digital CEO

Are you connected or becoming disconnected - By Didier Grossemy

Didier Grossemy theory is that the more connected we are, the more we become disconnected

Article written by:  Didier Grossemy | X2 Digital CEO

We are living in an unprecedented social experiment.

Never so much technology has been available to everyone.
From a very young age, children start with a computer connected to the Internet then graduate very quickly in the name of parent security with mobile phones, they are the new generation of connected kids.
For these kids social interactivity is happening through emails, SMS and of course what it is called “Social” sites with the likes of Facebook and others.

Adults are very much the same, if you are working in an office, how many times do your co-workers send you an email? Rather than just talking to you... Even if they are just a few meters away…
People just don’t communicate any longer by delivering through their voice and posture a unique charisma and message. Today they will simply SMS or email each other. Individuality almost does not exist as more and more people evolve amongst groups within the so called “Social Networking Sites” and try to outdo each other.

Remember the blink in the eyes and the nice smiles… all gone…

Our interpretation of laughing is now put in three letters “LOL” at the beginning I could not understand people telling me always “lol” I thought I was a kind of a… you know… lol…Lolita… etc… anyway one day I finally graduated and find out that “lol” meant “Lots of Laugh” so you make someone laugh they will reply “lol”.

This is what the world is all about now? Having a good laugh with someone, a tap on the shoulder, a cry, a kiss, a strong emotion is now tree letters. Great! or actually very sad…
If you want to find friendship or life companion, don’t bother talking to your friends or going to a party simply hit a dating site. People will say, it’s SAFE…that’s on itself relatively scary… what’s safe about talking to someone that you don’t know and could be pretending to be anyone. What about falling in love with that person and discover later that the athletic description and impersonation is in fact right the opposite.
Strange world… people are feeling more comfortable in using technology to connect with someone else rather than being in front of another human being.

Are we are becoming a slave of technology rather than using it for what it was designed for…productivity.

What are the consequences of this social behaviour?

Are we connected or socially disconnected…

I personally believe that technology has reduced our social capital—the relationships that bind people together and create a sense of community. Consequences include decreased civility, loss of behavioural boundaries and increased crime. We must find ways to deal with our profound loss of social connectedness.

Even though technological advances have contributed significantly to the problem of isolation, the emphasis on individualism in today’s society has compounded it.

Pappano believes that often we may want to connect with others and to have deep and meaningful relationships, but we want it on our own terms. “We have moved from a society in which the group was more important than the individual,” she says, “to one in which the central figure is the self. ... From the ashes of duty we have risen to claim not merely a healthy dose of freedom but individual supremacy. ... We want success, power, and recognition. We want to be able to buy or command caring, respect, and attention. And today so many of us feel deserving of the service and luxuries once accorded a privileged few. We may live in a more egalitarian society, but we have become puffed full of our own self-worth.”

She believes that the concept of self-sacrifice is no longer a significant part of our modern cultural makeup and is often seen as weakness, not strength. More and more people are evaluating their relationships in terms of cost-benefit analysis and weighing friendship in light of investment and return. Today, instead of considering others, people are more likely to put their own needs first and ask, “What’s in it for me?”

As a result, many are experiencing a new loneliness that stems from being overcommitted and under connected. And increasingly we are being led into a social isolation that we barely notice. As Miller says, “little by little, isolation becomes familiar, even normal. Sadly, even loneliness becomes like the wallpaper in your room; you don’t even really notice it’s there.”
Is it because we want more? Of course it is…

Journalist Laura Pappano (The Connection Gap) examines the impact of the market-driven frenzy to have increasingly more. As we cut ourselves off from one another, we are surrounding ourselves with the newest and latest gadgets and material comforts. Not only do we want these things, however; we want them now. Like Gleick, Pappano believes that “speed has become the Holy Grail.

We want faster service, faster computers, faster fast food, and faster athletes. The pace is so frenetic that speed that is merely linear is no longer speedy. Speed must now have bulk. It is not enough for one thing to be done fast; many things must be done fast at the same time or in such tight sequence that one nearly cuts short the next.”

Multitasking, a term coined by computer scientists in the 1960s to express the ability of a computer to perform multiple operations simultaneously, is now applied to the human machine. Because it is possible to do several things at a time, we try to cram in as much as possible.
As Gleick writes, “These days it is possible to drive, eat, listen to a book, and talk on the phone, all at once, if you dare. No segment of time—not a day, not a second—can really be a zero-sum game.”

To be or not to be… technology free

Some tech-free celebs are recovering tech addicts. Tyra Banks told New York Times Magazine that her BlackBerry habit caused her physical pain. She has since gone low-tech and jots her thoughts in a notebook.

Technophobia, of course, extends far beyond cell phones.

Christopher Walken and David Sedaris don't use cell phones or e-mail. Simon Cowell says he doesn't know how to work a computer. President Bush was lampooned in 2006 for saying he uses "the Google" to look at maps of his Texas ranch. He reportedly doesn't use e-mail for fear that his messages might be subpoenaed. Recently, however, his 84-year-old father, George H.W. Bush Sr., said that he enjoys emailing.

Paul McCartney has admitted he doesn't know how to use ATMs and prefers writing letters over e-mail for "aesthetic" reasons. Elton John is nostalgic for the low-tech vibe of the 1970s. The singer frequently talks about the Internet's stifling effect on community and creativity and even suggested to U.K. paper The Sun that the Internet be shut down for five years to spark better quality art and music.

Technophobia isn't simply generational.

Some young celebrities strive to be tech free, too. Thirty-one-year-old Orlando Bloom has revealed that he doesn't email or own a computer, because he "just [doesn't] want to deal with it."

So here we are… it’s like every good thing in life, you must know how and when to use it but not abusing it. Technology and social tools of all sorts should be used to facilitate relationships but not be the only way of life or business communication. If you only rely on one aspect of communication, personal life or business will simply be disconnected from the real world and from the ultimate end results.

Common! Pick up the phone, don’t be scared…talk or meet someone, it’s good for you.

Article written by:  Didier Grossemy | X2 Digital CEO