What is DKIM?

DKIM, Domain Keys Identified Mail, is a technique that uses your domain name to sign your emails with a digital “signature” so your customers know it’s really you sending those emails and that they haven’t been altered in transit.

The Benefits of DKIM

DKIM-signed messages can pass through email forwarding servers with their signatures intact. Like SPF, it requires no changes in behavior for end users. This makes DKIM and SPF much easier to deploy than S/MIME, and as a result they have been widely adopted by the world’s major email box providers.

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Limitations of DKIM

DKIM allows recipients to confirm sender identity and determine whether the message was altered during transit. But with just SPF and DKIM, there is no way for a recipient system to know how much reliance they should place on email validation.

There is also no policy framework—meaning the instructions are not there to indicate what to do with messages that fail authentication, and no feedback mechanism to let senders know what actions were performed.

DMARC Email Authentication

Together, SPF and DKIM provide an important framework to fight spam and ensure the integrity of the email. DMARC acts as an overlay on this framework and adds three key elements:

  1. Identity alignment: enables senders to specify how their email messages are authenticated and to make sure the end user receives the original email.
  2. Policy management: enables senders to determine how to check the “From” field presented to a user and what to do upon failure
  3. Reporting: provides senders an understanding of the actions performed under that policy

DMARC is the only way for email senders to tell email recipients that emails they are sending are truly from them.

Learn more about DMARC >

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Get started with DMARC Email Authentication

Get Started with DMARC

Cybercriminals can use almost any brand or email domain to send spam, phishing emails, and malware installs. DMARC allows companies to prevent malicious ones from getting to consumers inbox. Learn how protect your organization with our "Getting Started with DMARC" guide.