CHICAGO — While Yahoo executives have complete trust in the DomainKeys e-mail authentication system, they are not ruling out using other technologies, Yahoo Postmaster Miles Libby said at the Email Senders and Providers Coalition Deliverability Bootcamp.
In fact, Yahoo is receiving about one billion DomainKeys-verified e-mail messages daily, Mr. Libby said. He expects the yet-to-be finalized technology, developed by Yahoo, Cisco and other companies, to be ratified by the end of this year.
DomainKeys shows users positive messages, demonstrating that the e-mail is from a legitimate sender, but does not include “negative” messages, such as those used in Sender ID technology.
Sender ID, adopted by MSN Hotmail, includes messages on e-mails such as “This sender cannot be verified” from domain names not verified by the ISP.
However, Libby does not rule out Yahoo using negative authentication messaging in the future.
“We're getting consumers used to e-mail that can be verified. As time goes on, we can definitively say this is NOT from [a certain sender],” Mr. Libby said.
Meanwhile, Libby distanced Yahoo from the flak that AOL has taken over implementing Goodmail CertifiedEmail.
Yahoo said last October it would use CertifiedEmail, but has not been criticized the same way that AOL has.
“The first major difference is that we are designating it for transactional e-mails only. This avoids a lot of the, 'All e-mails need to be spam' kind of concerns,” Libby said.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
