DKIM Starting to Become Mainstream in Email Authentication
Thursday 31 January 2019, 9:03PM
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DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is widely considered the most complex email authentication protocol currently relevant to the email-marketing industry. As ISPs continue to develop, their guidelines and restrictions change – due to this, DKIM is becoming more and more important, despite its relative intricacy.
As email security advances, emails that are not encrypted with Domain Keys miss out on preferential treatment, and will eventually be treated as suspicious, similar to the recent impetus to boost the prioritisation of SPF, another email security protocol.
Essentially, DKIM is a framework designed to let a company or corporation take ownership over the transmission of a message in such a way that it is recognised by ISPs. It’s worth noting that the verification itself involves cryptographic authentication, and it also ensures that messages aren’t intercepted and altered, tampered with, or otherwise made malicious by an uninvited third-party.
While knowing each and every step of how it works isn’t important, understanding why it matters is. Email providers that implement DKIM are able to identify whoever signed the protocol as part of a wider effort to mitigate spam, phishing scams, spoofing, etc. DKIM does not make any changes itself, nor does it suggest any to receivers.
Due to its complexity, DKIM is often passed over in favour of other security protocols, but the truth is, business email companies really need to implement all available security frameworks.
The newest of the main three email security protocols, DMARC, promises to eventually eliminate the problem by overcoming some of the shortfalls of its predecessors. But, until adoption of uniform protocols is routinely enforced by ISPs across the board, it falls to email senders to ensure they have met as many standards as possible, to avoid being left behind.
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