Summary
In today’s digital landscape, ensuring your emails get to the desired recipient’s inbox is paramount. Email authentication has emerged as a cornerstone of this assurance. But what really is email authentication, and how does it impact email deliverability?
Debunking Myths Around Email Authentication
Is everyone talking about it? Undoubtedly, in the realm of email marketing, authentication is a hot topic.
What is worth underlining first, is that not everything being said is true. It's essential to differentiate between factual information and hearsay. There is a lot of myth about authentication circling at conferences and gigs targeting email. Some of it is related to the “ancient” ways of authenticating messages, some is just gossip going around for no reason known even to the oldest of the wisest. The fact is that it is something every professional email sender should be familiar with. Without it, emails may be flagged as suspicious or unrecognized, undermining deliverability efforts. And that’s bad news.
Is everyone doing email authentication? Not necessarily, at least to some extent. The truth is, unfortunately, that there’s still a surprisingly high amount of senders out there, not bothering with validation – either not properly or at all. If you find yourself in either of those groups, please, keep reading. Otherwise, you are missing out on an opportunity for a significant deliverability boost. Ignoring this step could mean missing out on enhanced deliverability.
Does it solve all deliverability issues? No. It is a very significant factor in email delivery. That’s a fact. If you want to get to the inbox, you must first be let inside the email infrastructure. The Mailbox Providers want to know who you are. While email authentication is fundamental in email delivery, it doesn't guarantee inbox placement. However, there are other factors to be taken care of, in the group called best practices, which are not less important. While email authentication is the foundation, adhering to best practices in email marketing determines the structure you build upon this base. Changing records in the DNS won’t fool spam filters if one’s practices are otherwise fishy. You can think of email authentication as a cornerstone of deliverability. It is essential. But what will you build upon it, that’s another story.
Is there only one way to authenticate? Absolutely not. Whereas there are good and bad ways of handling authentication, even within the good ways, there are some alternatives. Though there are recommended practices, multiple approaches exist. Resources like M3AAWG and CSA offer invaluable guidance, but when in doubt, always consult an expert.
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The Pillars of Email Authentication
So what is authentication? Email authentication employs protocols , leveraging DNS records and encryption, to verify:
- The email’s origin.
- The email’s source.
- The email’s integrity during transit.
In addition, it is possible to request a specific action from the recipient if any of the above is in doubt. Let’s go through the most important protocols for this process.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
Understanding SPF:
Consider an analogy where your friend Jenny shares her travel itinerary with you. She left you a list of towns she will be visiting on the way. Every time you get a letter signed as “Jenny”, you can easily check a stamp. When you receive a letter postmarked from a city on her list, you know it's genuinely from her. But if the postmark doesn't match, you're rightly skeptical. She’s never supposed to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico; how come you got a letter saying “Jenny” coming from there?
Mechanics of SPF:
SPF uses TXT records in the sending domain's DNS to list authorized IP addresses for sending email. By authenticating senders, recipients can identify legitimate email and reject potential phishing attempts. This means that any of the IPs included in this set of records (or just a single record) can send messages with a mail-from address using that domain. If you are or will be using an ESP, you are using the IP assigned to you or shared with other users. And if you own a domain (which, frankly, you should), you will most likely need to add these IPs to your domain's SPF record. This will tell recipients that “I allow these IPs to send messages with my domain in the “Mail From” address. This is the basis for further authentication steps. Basically, if a recipient sees an IP trying to send a message with a domain that doesn't allow such an IP, they can easily drop the message.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
Understanding DKIM:
Now, let's assume that Jenny from the previous example gave you an extra card before she left town. This card shows how she's going to write her letters to you. There will be a specific way of doing it. It could be a certain last letter of each sentence or some other great way to show that she's the one writing the letters and no one else. Whenever she sends you a letter, it will follow this unique pattern. This ensures that the letter is really from her and remains unaltered in transit.
Mechanics of DKIM:
This method uses a pair of encryption keys: a public key (published in the DNS zone) and a private key (kept by the domain owner). When an email is sent, the private key encrypts certain parts of the email. The subdomain suffix is called a "selector" and is also added to the message as an additional header. This is necessary for the recipient to know where to look for a public TXT record of our signature. When the message is sent, the sender uses the private key to encrypt some part of the message (certain headers, body, subject, etc.). The encrypted portion is also added as an additional header, which is later captured by the recipient. Finally, the recipient can use the encrypted part and compare it to the pointed parts of an email using a public key (still published in the DNS zone). The public key can only be used to decrypt the hash (encrypted string). It only works one way. A particular domain can not only "sign" a message, but also ensure that the pointed parts of it have not been altered along the way.
If the key is compromised, the whole process must be repeated. The recipient then decrypts those segments using the public key, verifying the email's authenticity and ensuring it hasn't been tampered with.
The alternatives:
What differs between senders are the actual parts of the message that are encrypted; some will only "sign" recipient headers (To:, CC:), and others will also sign author headers (From:). It's possible to sign the subject, body, and any other header. It has also been proven that so-called over-signing has its value. Over-signing prevents a malicious entity from adding a header that the author didn't originally add.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)
Understanding DMARC:
Finally, our example reaches the point, when neither the list of places nor the letter itself and the “code” your friend has established, do not add up. Now, fortunately, Jenny has foreseen something like that might happen. She left you another note on what to do with such letters.
Three options are possible:
- You can do nothing with the message except for treating it as you would normally do.
- You should put the message in a drawer and leave it there.
- You should throw away the message.
Jenny picked the second option. Except for the above, you should also inform her by sending the information about the letter to the address pointed by her in the letter.
Now, you complied with her wishes.
Mechanics of DMARC:
DMARC is a TXT record in DNS, defining a policy for recipients on handling emails that fail both SPF or DKIM checks. It can also specify reporting addresses, providing insights into authentication failures, which can be instrumental in refining email strategies. This record should contain flag p= which stands for “policy”. One of three policies is possible:
Three options are possible:
- None
- Quarantine
- Reject
The above is analogous to the behavior in our example. Another flag is the reporting flag – it specifies the address to which reports should be sent. The aggregated reports of DMARC compliance or non-compliance should be sent by the recipients, which can then be analyzed by professionals and used to build a strategy for protection and self-improvement. In our examples above, you can be pretty sure when mail claimed to be from Jenny can be trusted, and you know, what to do whenever it’s suspicious. If you’d go through a similar process whenever writing a letter to Jenny, your correspondence would be pretty safe and trustworthy. In such a way, we can treat email authentication.
Email authentication is a linchpin in ensuring your emails aren't just dispatched, but also delivered. In a world where mass emailing and email marketing are prevalent, understanding and correctly implementing authentication protocols is crucial. If the realm of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC seems daunting, always remember: there's no shame in seeking expert guidance. Your email deliverability depends on it.
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