Imagine if your email address authentication could always make it to customers’ inboxes. If they weren’t flagged or filtered by spam filters, you would be able to communicate with your audience in a more meaningful way. Email authentication helps you reach your audiences in their inboxes by signaling to ISPs that your emails are legitimate and deserve a safe passage through their systems. Without authentication, emails can be flagged as spam and blocked, leading to missed opportunities and potential loss of customer trust.
Email Address Authentication: Ensuring Reliable Communication
Email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC verify that the email you send comes from the domain that it claims to come from. This provides a level of security that prevents spoofing, reduces the risk of phishing attacks, and improves deliverability.
SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, lets you tell ISPs that the email coming from your domain is authentic. It works by comparing the email’s header with its digital signature—similar to how a letter receives a postmark and wax seal to identify it as genuine.
DKIM, or Domain Keys Identified Mail, adds another layer of security to email messages by matching a private key stored on an email server with a public one published in DNS records. This creates a unique cryptographic signature for each message and verifies that the email was sent from the verified domain.
DMARC, or Domain-Based Message Authentication, is the most advanced email authentication protocol that combines SPF and DKIM checks with a global alignment check. This allows marketers to gain insight into email authentication issues across multiple ISPs and ESPs.