You may have always wondered the reason why some emails go to your inbox, but others get sent to your spam (especially the important ones!). This usually happens when emails don’t have proper authentication. To ensure emails are trusted and get delivered securely to inboxes, email authentication is key, as it plays a crucial role in improving deliverability, preventing email spoofing, and maintaining your sender reputation.
What Exactly is Email Authentication?
To put it simply, email authentication is a way to confirm the legitimacy of the sender’s domain. It verifies if an email from a certain domain is in fact from that domain and allows email providers to better determine if an email should be trusted. This, in turn, enhances security, improves deliverability to intended inboxes, and helps reduce the risk of phishing and spoofing attacks.
Core Email Authentication Protocols
There are three main email authentication methods, each of which focuses on a different aspect of an email’s journey to verify its authenticity. The first one is SPF (and, no, we’re not talking about sun cream here!). SPF, which stands for Sender Policy Framework, allows domain owners to specify which mail servers are authorised to send emails on their behalf. This works by the recipient’s server checking the sender’s IP address against the SPF record in the DNS, and if the IP matches, the email passes authentication. All Crunchy Carrots websites share the same IP, so to make sure your emails being sent from your website pass authentication, they should have ‘v=spf1 ip4:35.214.3.142 -all’ in your DNS records. If this all sounds a bit too technical or confusing, hopefully you have an IT team that manages your emails. If this isn’t the case, and would like us to help, we work with trusted partners who can sort this out for you.
The other core email authentication protocols are DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). DKIM adds a digital signature to outgoing emails to ensure the email is authentic and hasn’t been altered during transit. This in turn helps prevent spoofing and improves email deliverability by verifying the domain. DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM and gives domain owners control over how unauthenticated emails are handled. These additional records should be given by your email provider, so we recommend speaking with them to get it sorted. Alternatively, if you require assistance, get in touch and we can direct you to the right place to ensure your customers and clients are receiving all your emails.