email authentication dmarc by godmarc

Email Authentication: What Is It And How Does It Improves Deliverability?

Email authentication isn’t only about security — it’s also about deliverability. By setting up DKIM and SPF records in place and authenticating your emails, you can easily protect your brand and help emails reach your inbox successfully.

To prevent email fraud and ensure continued delivery, Email Authentication is the key.

In this post, we will tell you how email authentication has become an integral part of the email delivery process and how it improves deliverability.

What Is An Email Authentication?

Email authentication, also known as domain authentication or validation, is a technical process used for validating your email for authenticity against all authorised sources that are allowed to send emails from your domain. It is a great method to help prevent spoofing and phishing scams in case the email message gives an impression of being from one domain, but it actually gets delivered from another.

Email authentication gives mailbox providers confidence that the messages they see from senders are authentic and not forged.

What Is The Need For Email Authentication?

The internet standard for email transfer (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) contains no feature to authenticate inbound and outbound emails. This allows cyber attackers to exploit the lack of security in SMTP, empowering them to perform phishing scams, domain spoofing, and CEO frauds.

The biggest threat is that they can impersonate your brand and harm its reputation. Email authentication enhances the security of your domain against any kind of fraud and impersonation. Email authentication serves as a checkpoint for unapproved and malicious IP addresses that tend to send messages from your domain.

How Does Email Authentication Improve Deliverability?

There are three widely used authentication protocols. In a brief, let’s have a look at what they actually are:

1. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) performs a check similar to verifying a return address to authenticate a sender’s identity.
2. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authenticates a sender’s identity but goes further by ensuring the contents of the message are unaltered by using a locked box.
3. Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is the protocol that makes sure messages meet SPF and DKIM requirements before they get delivered.

Email Authentication implements these three practices to minimise cyber threats, and ensure an improved deliverability rate. Authenticating your email with SPF and DKIM proves to the ISPs that your identity is genuine and you are what you say you are.

How Can DMARC Improve Email Deliverability?

• DMARC reports help you acquire detailed visibility into your email ecosystem, empowering you to view your email authentication results, detect authentication failures and mitigate delivery issues.
• By authorising a strict DMARC policy, you can block malicious emails imitating your brand from landing into the inboxes of your recipients.
• While publishing a DMARC record in your domain’s DNS, the domain owner requests receiving servers to send feedback on the emails, indicating to receiving servers that your domain extends support towards secure protocols and authentication standards for emails, like DMARC, SPF and DKIM.

GoDMARC is a cloud-based analytical tool that empowers enterprises to easily deploy DMARC. Sign up today!