News & Press Releases

EmailLabs Implements SPF Sender Authentication Protocol

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (June 8, 2004) - As part of its evolving trust-based email marketing initiative, EmailLabs, a leading provider of email marketing automation solutions, today announced that the company has implemented the industry's new sender authentication protocol.

EmailLabs has implemented Sender Policy Framework (SPF), the authentication protocol that sets a standard requiring authorization of mail servers allowed to send email on the domains' behalf. Using the established Domain Name System (DNS) framework, SPF records can specify authorized email sources. Receiving mail servers can then scan these records during SMTP transactions, the current email delivery protocol, to ensure that the IP address of the sender is authorized to send email for a specific domain. Under the policy, a hypothetical spammer who attempted to send email with "billg@microsoft.com" would find that email blocked, if his or her IP address did not match an IP authorized to send email for Microsoft.

SPF aids legitimate email delivery by ensuring accountability. SPF also protects companies from being used as "complaint shields" for spammers. Email with an SPF record that clears the authorization process will potentially gain positive points in weighted content filter environments such as SpamAssassin and ISP filters. Additionally, AOL recently announced that in the near future senders that do not implement SPF will be dropped from AOL's Whitelist.

SPF is required because the SMTP protocol does not have an authentication component, which allows senders to masquerade as any domain and leads to exploitation and email forging. For example, a sender who claims to be billg@microsoft.com is not subject to any certification process that verifies whether senders are in fact authorized to use this address.

"The federal CAN-SPAM Act lays the foundation for a clear differentiation of spammers from permission-based email marketers," said Kirill Popov, director of ISP relations and delivery, EmailLabs. "In this era of customer control, it's even more important for companies to go beyond CAN-SPAM compliance and create trust-based email marketing programs. That's the impetus behind SPF, which gets to the core of building your reputation and trust -- ensuring the highest possible delivery rates for permission-based email."

About EmailLabs
EmailLabs is a leading provider of high-performance email marketing solutions to agencies, publishers and marketing departments of middle-market and Global 2000 companies. The EmailLabs email marketing platform is provided as an ASP (Web-based) service, and is easily integrated with a company's Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs' application programming interface (API). For the fourth consecutive year, EmailLabs has been recognized by ASPnews.com as one of the Top 50 ASPs worldwide and as a Top 25 Service Provider for the Software-as-a Service (SaaS) and Business Service Provider category. The company provides email marketing solutions to more than 550 companies, including Nokia, Agilent, PalmSource and Jupitermedia. Headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., EmailLabs was founded in 1999 and is a subsidiary of Lyris, Inc. (OTCBB:JLHY). For more information, visit www.EmailLabs.com.