The Certified Senders Alliance (CSA) has been in existence since 2004 as a central certification body for email senders. The joint project with the German Dialogue Marketing Association, DDV, establishes high legal and technical quality standards and certifies companies that meet them.

Certification offers numerous advantages: In addition to improved delivery of emails to recipients, companies can counter bad reputations and dissatisfied recipients as well as fines due to legal violations.

Growth with an international focus

The CSA once again processed a higher volume of IP addresses compared to the previous year. As of 31 December 2022, the CSA recorded 230,470 IP addresses on its certified IP list, representing a growth of approximately 35 per cent over the previous year.

The CSA received 64 qualified requests for certification, resulting in nine certifications. These figures demonstrate the consistently high-quality standard of the CSA. International events and trade fairs were able to take place again in some cases and opened up the opportunity to expand the CSA’s network. The CSA was able to gain a valuable American partner in 2022. Through the partnership and the integration of the CSA IP list, certified senders receive advantages in the deliverability of their mailings.

Added value for participants

The “Certification Monitor”, launched in July 2021, enables certified senders to independently track spam complaint rates at company, IP and domain levels. This transparency provides an effective early warning system that can be used to identify and notify problematic customers at an early stage. Certified senders can optimise email strategies together with their customers and protect their platform from abuse and spammers. In addition to the spam complaint rate, senders can find out about DKIM errors, spamtrap hits and individual complaints that can also damage their reputation. By sharing data with mailbox providers, the CSA was able to monitor approximately 430,000 individual DKIM domains in 2022 and provide information on an email volume of approximately 255 billion.

The Certification Monitor was enhanced with several new features in two releases in 2022:

• IP, account and token management in the Certification Monitor
• Improved usability
• Integration of data from the eco Complaints Office

Effectiveness of spam control

Quality control of certified senders is always a high priority for the CSA. The background to this is the promise of quality to mailbox providers and the promise to certified senders to be legally on the safe side and technically up to date with the CSA criteria.

The CSA could effectively warn certified senders in 2022 and protect the email ecosystem. Even though manual quality mechanisms are largely automated, the individual advice provided by the eco Complaints Office continues to be an important pillar for ensuring quality.

Digital formats for a strong network

The email community is international and very active. Various players are uniting to set up technical standards and improve the medium of email. The CSA is part of this and offers certified senders access to this network. Through blog articles on various legal and technical topics and intensive digital communication with its members, content could be shared and the network strengthened.

The 2022 CSA webinars were very successful with many international guest speakers, details of which are presented in the CSA live webinars section of this Annual Report. All webinars are available as recordings: https://www.youtube.com/@certifiedsendersalliance/playlists

The CSA looks back on a successful 2022 with a growing international focus and continues to work on legal and technical standards and their implementation to improve the quality of commercial emails.