The Habeas team returned from this year's Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) Summit in Seattle, and by most measures it was a roaring success.

As with past AOTA Summits, this year's featured a wide array of top-tier speakers, including Craig Newmark from Craig's List, former cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt, and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna.

Even at a time when travel and conference budgets are being slashed, the turnout for the AOTA Summit was great, with a tremendous mixture of brands, vendors, service providers, and current/former government officials.

There were also a number of excellent sessions covering the latest technologies and best practices in authentication, email security, and deliverability. We're proud to say that Habeas and some of our customers presented in several sessions, including at AOTA's first Email Deliverability and Trust Academy.

In this post are assembled some random thoughts and comments from several members of the Habeas team who participated in the event. Here are some of the most noteworthy observations:

The deployment of email authentication continues to grow, but it remains a daunting task. In January, AOTA reported that over 50% of email is authenticated in some fashion. These figures were confirmed at this month's Summit, and most of the attendees at AOTA are from companies that really understand the urgency and importance of authentication. The problem is not with the companies whose representatives are involved in AOTA or attending these conferences, rather it's with the thousands of companies who weren't there and who don't yet see authentication as a critical brand protection and reputation protection measure. Thus, some of the most interesting and difficult conversation topics at the summit were around how to grow that number.


There remains a great deal of tension between email senders and receiving ISPs regarding who owns the consumer relationship at the inbox. One attendee made the point that the existence of the "This is Spam" button makes it difficult for a sender to get more useful preference information from their customers. For example, perhaps a recipient really only wants to receive such messages monthly rather than daily or weekly. It's difficult to get a recipient to consider such a choice when the Spam button is glowing in their face.

 
In many of the sessions, we saw continuing evidence that deliverability remains a significant challenge for many major brands, in large part because it can be a very imprecise science. Even when companies employ the very best practices, the difference in how various ISPs assess reputation continues to make reliable deliverability a challenge. For example, SPF records may have a great deal of weight at one ISP, while DKIM signatures have more weight at another. Content filtering may also see a resurgence for ISP to ISP email due to some problems with hackers breaking the "CAPTCHA" process and automatically creating accounts for spamming. All of this points, yet again, to the importance of comprehensive and ongoing reputation management.


Adding further confusion to the deliverability landscape is the proliferation of "best practices" documents and recommendations. With recommendations out there from the DMA's EEC, the ESPC, MAAWG, the IAB, and others, it will be increasingly difficult for senders to stay on top of what "state of the art" actually means. If there's good news for Habeas customers, however, it's that we stay on top of these for you. More importantly, we are very involved with these organizations, and others, and continue to work to resolve any discrepancies and contradictions between all of these standards.


We closed the event with a fabulous group dinner at “The Met” including our customers Sal Tripi from Publishers Clearing House and Sean Walker from The PGA -- and were joined by Craig Spiezle from the AOTA board, members of the team and a few industry friends.


The AOTA Summit continues to be the premier event focusing on authentication issues and technologies. But even though the event is over, the challenges being addressed by the members and attendees continue. Habeas is proud to be helping AOTA drive the effort to get everyone to "Authenticate in '08!"


As always, Habeas Advisory Services and our extended team are happy to help you and your organization with email reputation management and inbox deliverability strategy and execution to achieve your business goals.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

By: Des Cahill, CEO

"Road Noise" was the title of an audio journal I made during a long and interesting car journey through the Pacific Northwest sometime in the late 80's. The exact date and route is somewhat fuzzy. I visited various relatives and friends in Northern California, Oregon and Washington during that epic journey - and the tape has achieved mythic cult status amongst this group. Who can forget the interview with the sorority sisters in Eugene or the entry from I-5 just north of Medford when we nearly got clipped by that semi?
 
Well, I'm resurrecting the brand. Road Noise is appropriate as I've been traveling a lot this last month. MAAWG in Dublin, then a quick jaunt to London for eTail and hop over the pond to New York for the Stevie Awards last week. DM Days in New York this week. And more to come in July with the FTC Spam Summit in DC. Once again, it's all a little fuzzy. So here's a Road Noise post on these past few days in New York and DM Days. It'll help me remember the key happenings and hopefully provide an interesting perspective for you.
 
Ahhhh, New York City in the early summer. Warm weather. Times Square. Street vendors. Food carts. Groups of tourists. Throngs of tourists. Tourists everywhere. Buses and hotels full of them. All from Europe or Asia - yes, the falling dollar has made $500. hotel rooms a bargain if you're paying in pounds, yen, or euros. New York is a great place to be in June, but it isn't a place to seek solitude.
 
But if you're in the online marketing or email business, then a great place for some alone time would've been the Jacob Javitz Convention Center where DM Days was being held. The conference was fairly well attended, but it wasn't an INBOX level affair. 95 percent of the vendors and attendees were in the off-line list business. There was a small interactive enclave, but the only friendly faces I saw exhibiting were FreshAddress and ListTrack. There was an all-day email 101 track that Austin Bliss was running, and he was kind enough to invite me to present at one of the sessions on compliance and best practices. It was well attended and reminded me that there are a lot of email marketers out there who don't know about authentication or reputation, and are still trying to figure out best practices basics. There is still a lot of education and outreach to be done through the AOTA, ESPC, MAAWG and of course, the DMA.
 
So, I give a bleak review of DM Days. This morning, I pointed out DMA's lack of relevance to online marketers to someone in the industry. "Why doesn't the DMA 'get' interactive marketing?" I said, "ad:tech is eating the DMA's lunch with their conferences." My breakfast guest pointed out that the DMA, unlike ad:tech, does more than conferences. It covers a broader spectrum of marketing activities and does extensive policy work and outreach through its lobbying efforts. He pointed out that the DMA may not be the best at representing best practices standards in email or online marketing but, "the DMA is a lot like the U.S. It's imperfect, it's powerful, it's influential and until someone or something else comes along, it's the only game in town."
 
Great line I thought.
 
So if the fear of being surpassed by Japan motivated U.S. economic and educational reform in the 80's, and fear of being surpassed by China may yet motivate the U.S. to be more globally competitive in the latter part of this decade - who is going to motivate the DMA to get more attuned to the radical shift in marketing dollars to the online world?