If you send or receive email, you may have heard of DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail. But what is it and why is it important for email security?
DKIM is an email authentication method that uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the owner of a domain. This helps prevent spoofing, which is when someone pretends to be someone else by using their email address.
Spoofing can be used for phishing, spamming, or impersonating legitimate senders. For example, a hacker could send an email from your bank’s domain asking you to click on a link and enter your account details. If you don’t check the email carefully, you might fall for the scam and give away your personal information.
To prevent this, DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to the header of every outgoing email. The signature is created by using a private key that only the sender has access to. The signature contains information about the domain, the message body, and other parts of the email.
The receiver of the email can then verify the signature by using a public key that is published in the sender’s domain’s DNS records. The public key is used to decrypt the signature and compare it with the original message. If they match, it means that the email was not tampered with and that it came from the domain that claimed to send it.
DKIM is one of the three main email authentication protocols, along with SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance). SPF checks if the sender’s IP address is authorized by the domain owner, while DMARC sets policies for how to handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM verification.
By using DKIM, you can improve your email deliverability, reputation, and trustworthiness. You can also protect your recipients from malicious emails that could harm their security or privacy. To set up DKIM for your custom domain, you need to generate a private and public key pair, enable DKIM signing for your outgoing emails, and publish your public key in your DNS records.
If you want to learn more about DKIM and how it works, you can check out these resources:
- How to use DKIM for email in your custom domain | Microsoft Learn
- How To Setup DKIM in 3 Steps – Set Up DNS & EMail | YouTube
- How to Set up DKIM? Step-by-step Guide | YouTube
- G Suite DKIM Setup In Under 5 Minutes – Step By Step Tutorial / Guide | YouTube
- DKIM Record: What is it and How to create it – IONOS
- DKIM Guide: How to Set Up the Email Standard Step by Step – Agari
- What is DKIM & DKIM Record and Why is it Important? | Mimecast
- DomainKeys Identified Mail – Wikipedia
