Messaging News - June 2008 - (Page 20)

REPUTATION ANALYSIS Online Business Practices to Avoid If you are a business that sends out email campaigns your reputation should be of vital importance to you. The recent release of a 2008 study of consumer attitudes towards email and online interaction with businesses identified the following practices to avoid. Source: Barracuda Networks While not alone in adding layers to secure email and score reputations, Pao does see a shift coming. “Our security space is very fragmented, there are lots of vendors offering security. What is beginning to happen is the anti-spam problem is becoming complex enough where you have to have a certain amount of scale in order to do it well,” he believes. “What we will see from an industry perspective is that a set of folks with the expertise, and access to the resources, will become much fewer and farther between.” IP reputation is the third in Barracuda’s 12 layers. Sender authentication is the fourth layer. “The more sophisticated and innovative techniques to block spam are layered on along the process. You cannot ignore doing the easy things before doing the more complex. It is like not locking your door, just because you have an alarm system.” Moving Forward The whole measure, counter measure game has made this a very complex problem to solve because each side keeps escalating. Pao notes that spammers are now required to spend greater and greater engineering and technical resources in order to get their mail through. “They have been forced to do stuff to their mail, which reduces their efficacy at marketing promotions—like having to misspell words or images or garbage text in the email. This leads to inferior marketing pieces, and ultimately not as good a conversion rate.” He optimistically hopes that as the war continues to escalate it will simply not make economic sense for a spammer to continue. “At some point, like with any war, it just makes sense for someone to put down their arms. Over time, the level of sophistication required to send out emails will continue to increase, and the response from consumers will continue to decrease, causing people who are currently spamming to find something else to do.” Pao recognizes however, that the reality of the situation is quite different. “This escalation in sophistication is creating the breeding ground for new forms of business to outsource this technical expertise. We are seeing the malware being distributed as Software as a Service (SaaS). It used to be it was the penny stock guys, or the grey market Viagra guys that were putting the most money into it. Now, we are seeing the more sophisticated techniques being used by the mainstream, like the fake luxury product guys, or fake education degrees, because you can now rent the botnets—that expertise—on a SaaS bases. We will see more and more spammers using the techniques that used to be reserved for the more sophisticated spammers.” Will there ever be a time when we can truly connect identify and reputation, consistently and accurately? Experts think so, including Hathcock. “Once the deployment of techniques like DKIM are widely adopted and a shift is made from IP-based to domain-based reputation services, the email world will be a much better place.” SJ/TMP • Daily email messages ranked with pop-up advertisements as the most damaging online tactics to a company's online reputation. As many as one in four respondents lose some degree of faith in an organization that is unable to deliver email reliably. On average, about 80 percent of respondents are not comfortable with businesses sharing their email address. Internet users believe that about two thirds of companies are likely to share their email addresses with third parties. More than 80 percent feel that a business’ reputation is negatively affected if it shares customer email addresses with third parties. • • • • While these are consumer thoughts, there are lessons to be learned for any business-to-business organization trying to avoid a negative reputation. SJ/TMP Source: Habeas, Inc. FOR YOUR REFERENCE Alt-N Technologies www.altn.com Barracuda Networks www.barracudanetworks.com Ferris Research www.ferris.com Habeas, Inc. www.habeas.com 20 MESSAGING NEWS JUNE 2008 http://www.altn.com http://www.barracudanetworks.com http://www.ferris.com http://www.habeas.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - June 2008

Messaging News - June 2008 Editor’s Note Short Takes Classification & Retention Spam: Bigger, Faster, and More Dangerous Bad Behavior and Today’s Reputation Analysis The Changing Locus of Collaboration Serving Up Managed and Hosted Messaging Solutions “On Message” with Ben Gross SCAP Standard Benefits Both Government and Commercial Space Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - June 2008

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