Email marketing is a great tool for businesses, but not everything is sweet. It can be said that the worst aspect is spam and email spoofing.
Spam is bad, but email spoofing is a serious problem as well. Bad actors can create an email that looks like it's coming from someone you trust and send it to your inbox. if the recipient can be fooled into believing the source, it’s still only one more small step to convince them to hand over their credit card details, share login information or download a virus.
This is where email authentication protocols come in handy, and SPF is one of them. These are important aspects of email authorization that you will need to keep in mind if you want to successfully send email campaigns to a group of customers or followers.
In this article, we will explain the importance of SPF and DKIM. You will see what happens if these are not set correctly.
The Importance Of Email Authorization
Today, email authentication is like a seal that used to be applied to paper scrolls.
A SPF and DKIM signature on your email is how you tell the recipient's email server that the message was sent by somebody they know, or at least not an automated spammer. Using SPF and DKIM ensures that your messages enter the recipient's inbox and are not spammed.
SPF or Sender Policy Framework
When SPF is set up correctly, it not only notifies the servers that your emails are allowed to be sent, but also prevents them from being spammed and damaging your credit.
In short, SPF and DKIM can help you if you want to increase the email delivery and credibility of your domain. If SPF is not set, SMTP has no way to authenticate the sender. SPH informs that the email comes from a reputable source.
Using SPF makes spoofing very difficult. When a froud sends an email claiming to be from paypal, the recipient server first checks to see if the email was sent from a source authenticated by PayPal.
How SPF Works?
The DNS TXT record in the transmitter domain contains an SPF record. If an organization uses multiple subdomains to send email, it must assign an SPF record to each of them. This SPF specifies which sender is approved, which is specified by its IP address.
DKIM or DomainKeys Identified Mail
SPF alone is not perfect for authentication. For this reason, other authentication protocols have been developed, one of which is DKIM.
The second part of authentication is DKIM, which is located in the code section of each email and we know it as the Header. In fact, DKIM uses cryptography to let the email provider know that your email is valid and not fake.
