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Midway through 2007 we introduced email authentication to Campaign Monitor, as an optional change you can make to increase the deliverability and security of your email campaigns.

We've seen a huge amount of people setting up Sender ID and DomainKeys records for their 'from' domains. We introduced an email authentication FAQ for some common questions, but since then a few more common questions have cropped up.

Email authentication can be a tricky area, but it is worth exploring as it is likely to become more important in the future. If you have any more questions, leave them as comments below.

As I've mentioned before, your sending reputation and the relevance of your email are some of the most important factors that can determine if your email arrives in the inbox or the junk folder. In order to evaluate your sending reputation, more and more ISP's are using their "Mark as Spam" button. It's pretty simple, if you only occasionally get a spam complaint made against you and you don't send to that address again, you should be OK. Get lots of complaints and keep sending to those addresses and you're in trouble.

Many of the popular ISP's out there share these complaints with Campaign Monitor so we can monitor our customers and also keep your lists clean of those who clearly don't want to hear from you any more. To date we're reporting on such complaints for Hotmail/MSN, AOL, United Online, Roadrunner and USA.net.

We have now extended our spam reporting feature to include Comcast, the largest cable internet provider in the US. This means that any time a Comcast subscriber marks your email as spam, we'll remove them from your list and also provide a detailed report saying who did this and when. This integration means your list will stay clean automatically and you can gather indirect feedback from your customers about the relevance of what you're sending them.

Back in October Mat announced that we'd be running our annual Christmas design competition again this year. Well, the time is certainly upon us and we've already seen some crackers being sent through our pipes the last few weeks.

This year we've decided to up the ante a little on the prize front, so here's what you'll have a chance to win if the Freshview team vote your Christmas email design the pick of the bunch...

1. An iPhone (or an iPod touch if you don't live in a country where it's available)
2. A $100 Threadless voucher (wait 'til they have a sale on and that's 10 very cool t-shirts)
3. 50,000 Campaign Monitor email credits (that's $500 worth)

We'll also have some cool prizes for any of you that get an honorable mention. I realize most of you have probably sent your quota of Christmas emails already this week, but we've been keeping a very close eye on every email we've delivered the past few weeks. We've already spotted some cracking designs, and are looking forward to what we might see over the next few days.

For that last hit of design inspiration, check out our previous winners for 2006 and for Christmas 2005. For Christmas and holiday related imagery iStockPhoto is always a good option, as is stock.xchng.

We'll be announcing the winners here in the blog some time mid-January. Good luck!

Today we released a big round of updates to our API documentation and code samples to make it even easier to connect your Campaign Monitor account with your own web sites and applications. If you're a back-end developer that's right into this stuff, here's the scoop on what we've changed:

Vastly improved documentation

We've done a complete overhaul on the documentation for every method available in the API. Each method will now include the related samples that feature the method, the parameters used, return codes and sample requests and responses for SOAP, POST and GET. Check out the Subscriber.Add method to get an idea of what you can expect.

Comprehensive PHP wrapper

Thanks to incredibly generous Campaign Monitor customer and PHP developer Kaiser Shahid, we now have an all-inclusive PHP package that supports SOAP, GET and POST seamlessly. The sample also includes a complete set of functions that encapsulate every method available in the API.

Big Flash overhaul

All you Flash developers out there will be pleased to know that we've now got a much improved Flash sample ready for download. Kindly developed by Ben and the talented team at DNA Design, the sample includes a standard subscribe form as well as a more complex version supporting custom fields. The sample has also been coded in a way that makes it easy to use any of the other methods available in the API.

.NET C# and ASP samples move from the desktop to the web

For the .NET samples we have created a VisualStudio.NET 2003 project that includes example pages calling some of the different API methods available. The pages use standard ASP.NET controls and are written using the Code-Behind model. This project will also work with all newer versions of Visual Studio. We've also changed the samples from traditional desktop applications to web pages.

ColdFusion sample arrives

For all those ColdFusion developers we've now got a great API sample that includes a standards subscribe form and a more complex one supporting custom fields. The sample code will also be easy to modify to adopt any of the other methods supported by the API.

We've had an incredible response since we launched the ESP site late last month. Hundreds of thousands of page views, endorsements from many high profile designers and bloggers and some interesting conversations popping up all over the web. Of course, this response was fantastic and exactly what we had hoped, but the real aim of the project was to capture the attention of the big boys. The real changes had to be made by the Googles, Microsofts and IBMs of this world - if they didn't hear us then the whole effort didn't really mean much.

Well, today we officially took the first public step forward with Yahoo announcing they are fans of the project and will do everything they can to support 100% of our recommendations. Brian Goodman of the Yahoo! Mail team has been in close discussion with the ESP's own Mark Wyner to ensure future releases provide perfect acid test rendering.

Because Yahoo! Mail's standards support was already top-notch, this change won't make a significant difference to how you design emails for Yahoo. What it does do is provide a significant public endorsement of the importance of standards support from the largest email provider on the planet. Kudos to Yahoo! for being so responsive.

On top of this victory, we've also been fortunate enough to have some early conversations with many of the other email client developers in our "Improvement Recommended" category, and hope to post more on this in the ESP blog soon.