Contributed article: 5 ways to make your emails spoof proof

Spammers and hackers keep getting more creative when it comes to infiltrating inboxes and infuriating consumers. Learn to protect your subscribers and your image.

by Jordan Cohen (Sr. Director of Industry Relations, Goodmail Systems),
contributing to iMedia Connection, October 8, 2008

More than 850 million spoof emails arrived in consumers' inboxes this past August mimicking the prominent news media brands CNN and MSNBC and calling into question the integrity and safety of emails from these and other well-known and trusted media organizations.

While many consumers may already be skeptical about emails that claim to be from their bank or request their social security numbers, they are now left wondering whether something as innocent as reading the morning headlines might result in a stolen identity or a hacked computer.

Indeed, more and more media and publishing executives are waking up to the fact that they are the perfect prey for cybercriminals. The unique level of trust that these media companies have with their online viewers and readers, coupled with the especially high frequency of email they send, makes these organizations highly attractive targets. In the short term there are consumer safety issues, but in the long term, consumer trust in a given company's emails can become broken and it risks losing an entire channel. 

The latest authentication and certification solutions can protect email recipients from these types of attacks, but there are also some best practices a media company can adopt to instill greater trust in their messages. Here are my top five tips:

• Personalize your emails. Allow subscribers to choose the emails that interest them with as much granularity as possible and then stay consistent in sending frequency patterns. Fake emails are easier to detect when they arrive at atypical times or their content is inconsistent with the recipient's subscription choices.
  
  
• Clearly brand your email. Use consistent visual branding in your email messages, including factors such as logos, fonts and color schemes. Also, ensure consistency in the manner in which your emails are structured and organized. Use a consistent "From" address (or consistent address naming convention if you send email using multiple "From" lines.)
  
  
• Use the right email sending system. Media companies have special sending patterns: breaking news, for example, often means there will be peak email volumes deployed at unpredictable times. It is critical to have a system in place that is capable of delivering large volumes of email rapidly and securely. 
  
  
• Hack yourself. There are companies out there that will launch an attack on your infrastructure and tell you what is weakly designed, as well as products that scan your systems and alert you to attacks. There are also solutions that can tell you how your brand may be misused and abused across the internet without your knowledge. Bogus websites are just as bad as bogus emails and are often used together to launch these types of attacks.
  
  
• Educate consumers yourself. Use existing opportunities -- like the point-of-collection of the email address -- to alert subscribers. Teach them how to tell if an email is real or fake and what to do if they aren't sure. If you're using a new technology or best practice designed to make the emails spoof proof, tell them about it, how it works and what they can or should look out for.
  

Jordan Cohen is senior director of industry relations at Mountain View, Calif.-based Goodmail Systems..