Unless you’re totally new to email marketing, you know that most email programs turn images in your HTML emails OFF by default. It’s meant to protect your privacy, but is very annoying to legit email marketers for a variety of reasons. Well, Gmail to the rescue.

Matt Vernhout from EmailKarma reports that Gmail is now turning images ON by default, so long as the recpient has sent YOU, the sender, two messages in the past (kind of a neat way to make sure there’s a trusted relationship). Here’s the post from the official Gmail Blog.

There’s another catch — your emails to the recipient have to be authenticated (SPF or DKIM). As a reminder,  Authentication is a method used by many ISPs to judge whether or not an email is trustworthy (learn more at the Online Trust Alliance’s website). All major forms of authentication are built-in and automatically turned on for all your MailChimp campaigns.

As Matt points out, it’s almost worth it to get rid of any “DO-NOT-REPLY” statements you might be using, and actually encourage your recipients to send you emails. If it sounds a little too scary to add a “send us feedback!” link for your entire list, just add that for Gmail subscribers.

Here’s how you can segment your list and send only to your subscribers @gmail.

Word-to-the-wise reports that AOL will begin checking for DKIM Authentication sometime in 2009, as discussed in a recent ESPC call. They’re using DKIM to evaluate your overall “IP reputation” (check out the AOL blog for more on that). MailChimp customers, no need to worry. DKIM Authentication is included by default (and is free) in all MailChimp campaigns (that’s what this box means, in case you were wondering):

Reading through the FTC Spam Summit Report (472k PDF), I came across an interesting study they did, buried way back in the Appendix.

To determine how effective ISP spam filters are, they created 150 fresh new email addresses, and posted them at 50 locations around the Internet:

“The 50 Internet locations included websites controlled by the FTC and several popular message boards, blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites, video posting sites, and sites with user-generated content that had high hit/visit rates.”

Then they measured how much spam they got, how fast, and how much their ISPs’ spam filters blocked…

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Here’s an interesting article about email authentication over at NetworkWorld: Will Yahoo block messages that aren’t signed?

For years, ISPs have been a little vague about how they’re going to handle authentication. Will it be used to block email? Does every legit email marketer need to authenticate their messages? Do ESPs need to offer it to all our clients?

Network World Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan interviewed Mark Risher, anti-abuse product manager for Yahoo Mail, and asked some blunt questions, like:

1. What benefits does DKIM provide?
2. A year from now, will you be stopping a lot of mail at the front gate because of DKIM?
3. Will you send non-authenticated email through more filtering?

Risher also shared the following:“We have seen aggressive uptake of DomainKeys. More than 40% of our inbound traffic to Yahoo Mail is using DomainKeys. That’s more than 1 billion messages a day with the open source version. DKIM is its successor. …Within 18 months, all of the top financial institutions will use DKIM.”

FYI, MailChimp offers both DKIM and Domain Keys (along with SPF and SenderID) for free. Just check a box, and bam—you’re authenticated.

A few of our customers have been asking us about this bit of news from ReturnPath: AOL Changes Authentication and Whitelist Standards.

According to George Bilbrey, AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo have implemented DKIM email authentication.

For those of you who don’t know, authentication is a way to prevent email forgeries, and it can improve your deliverability. The AOTA says Authentication has hit its “tipping point.”

Since 2004, when email authentication started to really pick up steam, ISPs have been testing (and changing) their support for authentication. Some use one method for inbound, and another for outbound. Some support all methods of authentication. Some have abandoned it, or are in limbo. It can be confusing.

So we compiled a chart of which ISPs are using which authentication methods over here.

Of course, we’ve also made authentication “MailChimp Easy:” Our customers can authenticate their email campaigns with one simple click, and we cover all the major authentication standards (DKIM, Domain Keys, SenderID, and SPF).