Email Needs to Change

When email was developed in the 1970s, few predicted the impact it would have on global communications. Today email is one of the most pervasive forms of communication, used increasingly to speed the flow of information and reduce paper costs. As our dependence on this medium continues to grow, so do business and consumer expectations around what technology can deliver to their inboxes, including security and reliability for high-value communications.

However, the email ecosystem has fallen short of these rising expectations in recent years and continues to erode as fraud proliferates and massive volumes of junk email remain the norm. The state of email has become so problematic that 90% of all email sent today is some variant of spam despite repeated government and industry efforts (“You’ve Got Spam”, WSJ). To make matters worse, spamming tactics have steadily become more sophisticated and malicious – the worst being “phishing” messages purporting to be from legitimate senders in an attempt to elicit sensitive personal information including account and social security numbers.

The problem with the email environment to date is fourfold:

• The anonymity that email senders enjoy makes identifying and catching spammers and phishers virtually impossible.
• The freedom to send mass-emails at no cost compounds this problem by attracting fraudsters to play an extremely low-risk game of odds – the more emails they send, the more responses (and profits) they can expect to receive.
• While spam filters, our primary line of inbox defense today, allows us to manage spam, its success as a standalone solution to this problem has proven lackluster over the years and shows little promise of being able to do so in the foreseeable future.
• Finally, there is no trusted authority commissioned to regulate and combat abuse of this system. CAN-SPAM and other regulatory legislation has had marginal success. Less than 7% of spam complied with the requirements detailed in this legislation and less than 1% was compliant this past year (Damn Spam, pg. 3).

Given these factors, it comes to no surprise that spam campaigns have grown in frequency and scale over the years – tenfold over the past three years!

As a result, legitimate and illegitimate emails fill our inboxes daily as long as they are “legitimate” enough to bypass current spam filters. In a knee-jerk reaction to the persistent penetration of spam into our inboxes, spam filters have become increasingly restrictive to safeguard us from the onslaught of mass-mailings, catching an increasing portion of our desired emails from reaching us. There’s nothing worse than missing a bank payment because you didn’t get your electronic billing statement. Unfortunately, it happens today. 

Deliverability is one of the toughest problems facing legitimate email senders today.  Every ISP has their own “secret sauce” of white lists, black lists, content filters and they change the recipe continuously to combat the ever-changing tactics of spammers and phishers.

The competing email authentication standards of Sender ID and DKIM, meanwhile, are only beginning to be adopted in meaningul numbers, and cannot be relied upon today to ensure deliverability. Each ISP champions their own email authentication "standard" but even implementing both standards still does not guarantee your mail gets delivered. Becuase email authentication is only part of the solution - you also need "reputation". Well, of course there are multiple competing reputation providers. And of course each ISP picks and chooses their repuration providers. Do you need to subscribe to ALL the reputation services out there? Will that guarantee your email is delivered? Unfortunately, the answer is still no. There is only one solution that combines authentication and reputation today in a way that guarantees delivery and provides ironclad proof that the email was delivered. The name of that solution is PostmarkedEmail, and it is protected by the U.S. Postal Service Electronic Postmark®.

According to the Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG), there were 28,888 phishing attacks in June 2007-- representing 7.9 million emails per day. Both the number of attacks and the volume of messages are up over 40% from a just year ago. This is a problem that the financial and e-commerce industries originally faced several years ago and it has expanded to many other industries with over 140 popular brands being spoofed every month.

If legitimate businesses have trouble communicating with their customers via email, how can they benefit from its inherent value? What do businesses do if their customers won’t open their emails? Consumers are becoming increasingly wary of email and other electronic services – even those provided by their favorite brands.

Because  financial institutions and e-merchants are the most the common targets, phishing activities are degrading trust in the Internet as a preferred tool for business and consumer communications.