Authenticating Your Domain

Email authentication is a process by which senders are easily associated with their corresponding domains. By registering and authenticating a domain you are afforded the right to send emails safely and properly across multiple ISP’s via this channel. Below are brief explanations of the authentication processes we deem most important here at Kobemail.

DomainKeys – A digital “signature” located within the header of your mail designed to allow recipients to verify the DNS domain of an e-mail sender and the message integrity. DomainKeys was issued as a "historical" protocol (2007) and DKIM was issued as its standards-track replacement.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) - Allows a person, role, or organization to claim some responsibility for the message through a digital signature which can be validated by recipients.

The primary advantage of this system for e-mail recipients is it allows the signing domain to reliably identify a stream of legitimate email, thereby allowing domain-based blacklists and whitelists to be more effective. This is also likely to make some kinds of phishing attacks easier to detect.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - is an email validation system designed to prevent email spam by detecting email spoofing, a common vulnerability, by verifying sender IP addresses. SPF allows administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send mail from a given domain by creating a specific SPF record (or TXT record) in the Domain Name System (DNS).

Hope this gives you a basic understanding of the authentication process. Without first authenticating your domain email deliverability will be impossible as you will be seen by a threat and spam filters will not allow your emails to pass through to recipient inboxes.

Author & Editor: Caitlin Durand