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:
- Identity alignment: enables senders to specify how their email messages are authenticated and to make sure the end user receives the original email.
- Policy management: enables senders to determine how to check the “From” field presented to a user and what to do upon failure
- 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.
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