Anyone attempting to send legitimate email to their customers these days face the increasing challenge of hitting the Inbox instead of the SPAM folder.
Approaches like SPF and DKIM are helping, but they are long overdue.
Life has been too easy for SPAM senders for too long and the original mail protocols (SMTP and POP) did not really address the issues of authentication ("your passport please?..") and mail tampering. In defence the authors of those protocols weren't thinking that everyone in the world would one day use their protocols - they were intended for use originally in closed and intra-university networks were the people using the protocols were ... honest.
That's right. Honesty, trust, and wishful thinking powered the early Internet and remained in power until the rise of SPAM as a plague.
SPF and DKIM to the rescue!
Fortunately those protocols, while lacking authentication in their original design, allowed for future extensions by allowing extra "headers" to be stuffed into the envelope that delivers the mail message. SPF and DKIM both take advantage of this extensibility thus allowing their use in ALL your sent mail while the email message still remains backward compatible with servers and email agents which don't adhere to, or aren't aware of, these new authentication standards.
SPF and DKIM are both fairly easy to configure, but that still doesn't get you into your customer's Inbox automatically.
After many hours of struggling I still can't get that initial "welcome and thanks for signing up" email into a Yahoo Inbox first time. It ALWAYS lands in the Spam folder. How aggravating!
Telling of how f**ked this SPAM situation is, the DKIM reflector (which post masters should be able to use to verify their DKIM implementation) is not available because of abuse!!
Source: http://testing.dkim.org/reflector.html
Anyway, seems that Yahoo requires special treatment so I’ll be following the procedure of begging with their postmaster to have my emails white listed.