Delivering Genuine Emails in an Ocean of Spam

Swimming in an Ocean of Spam: How to Get Your Emails Read, Not Thrown Away

Everyone hates to weed through an avalanche of spam in their inbox just to get to the good stuff. We want notes from friends and family, important business documents, relevant information, critical notices, and valuable product offers.

The rest of it can rot.

Leo Hatton and Alan John, co-founders of SendForensics and authors of "Delivering Genuine Emails in an Ocean of Spam," which appears in the July/August 2017 issue of IEEE Software, offer advice to companies about how to get customers to read their emails. Their philosophy forms the foundation of their company’s goals in developing new types of email deliverability, compliance, and security systems. (Login may be required for full text.)

Authentication protocols with big-sounding names—Transport Layer Security, DomainKeys Identified Mail, Sender Policy Framework, and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance—are already in place.

Beyond that, companies must create consistently high-quality legitimate email. They also must send email that doesn’t just look pure but is actually pure.

How? SendForensics has developed metrics that will analyze an email’s quality and purity. The software that does this combines forensic algorithms and statistical models built by continual analysis of large amounts of email over many years.

In spite of the growth of social media and instant-messaging systems, email is still the preferred means of communication by industry. It behooves industry to make that email worth reading.

About Lori Cameron

Lori Cameron is a Senior Writer for the IEEE Computer Society and currently writes regular features for Computer magazine, Computing Edge, and the Computing Now and Magazine Roundup websites. Contact her at l.cameron@computer.org. Follow her on LinkedIn.