Email is still one of the most popular ways for businesses to engage with their customers. But, in order to protect their reputation and their subscribers’ privacy, email marketers need to ensure that their email messages are genuine. This article explains how email authentication checks can help them do just that.

The reason that email authentication has become such a best practice is that mailbox providers (like Gmail) want to know that the emails they are receiving come from a trusted source, and that the messages have not been tampered with in transit. If a mailbox provider suspects that an email may have been modified or sent from an untrusted source, they will likely reject it or send it to the spam folder. The good news is that there are several tools available to prevent this from happening, and the more email authentication methods you use, the better.

Ensuring Security: Email Authentication Check

There are four different email authentication standards that you can implement for your business: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). When an email is sent, the sending server will generate a signature of the message content based on its own unique ID, then sign it with its private key. The receiving server can then check the signature against the public key published in the DNS records to verify that the email came from the specified domain.

Adding both SPF and DKIM to your DNS will make it much harder for hackers to spoof your emails. In addition, DMARC allows domain owners to provide instructions to email receivers for how to handle messages that fail email authentication. For example, you can specify that unauthenticated emails should be rejected or quarantined. You can also add an additional layer of security to your messages by adding a BIMI record to your DNS. This will display your company logo in the recipient’s inbox and further confirm that your emails are indeed coming from a trusted source.