Although Microsoft's announcement earlier this month took some of the email industry by   surprise, EmailLabs immediately began working with its clients to establish valid Sender ID   records for all of their outgoing mail, said Kirill Popov, EmailLabs' director of ISP relations and delivery.

“Senders with poor consumer relationship practices will feel the worst effects of failing to implement Sender ID and run the costly risk of losing the attention of their MSN® Hotmail® Web-based email service users, which is typically 15 percent to 20 percent of a business-to-consumer sender's database,” Popov said.

EmailLabs was one of the first email service providers to adopt Sender ID authentication and views it as an industry-standard best practice for email marketing, along with transparency, permission, and establishing consumer trust. 

The benefits of Microsoft's Sender ID initiative, which Popov said is intended to stop phishing and other fraudulent email practices, more so than spam, will outweigh the short-term extra work emailers will have to do to meet the new authentication standard, he added.

“We believe that the Sender ID warning will help increase consumer trust in email as it gives users a much-desired level of transparency into their inbox,” he said.

The move also coincides with a shift in consumer attitudes toward trust and the Internet. A Pew Internet and American Life Project study found nine percent fewer Americans said they had lost trust in the Internet, compared with two years ago.

“Today’s email marketers need to do everything in their power to develop solid relationships with consumers, and following best practices and adhering to certain standards are critical first steps,” Popov stated.

Microsoft's Sender ID authentication applies to its MSN Hotmail email service with more than 190 million active users worldwide. Messages that fail a Sender ID check will now carry a message warning that Sender ID could not authenticate the emails origin, and may be directed to the user's junk-mail folder. While it has been incorrectly and widely reported that all unauthenticated messages are affected, this change only applies where a Sender ID record was found and the authentication check failed. Messages sent from domains that do not publish Sender ID records are unaffected for the time being. Beginning in November 2005, Microsoft will apply more stringent filters and increase the chance of unauthenticated messages being directed to recipients’ junk-mail folders. Similar UI and filter changes are also being included in the upcoming service packs for Outlook 2003 and the Exchange mail server.
 
The Sender ID Framework is an email authentication technology protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing and phishing by verifying the domain name from which an email is sent. 
Sender ID validates the origin of email by confirming the IP address of the sender against the purported owner of the sending domain.  To ensure the authentication is handled properly, 
EmailLabs has outlined the steps clients need to take for both professional services and formal client communications.