Editor | 
04 20th, 2009| 
Email authentication is a way to say, “This email is from Pinpointe’s servers, but it’s being sent on behalf of me, so you can trust it.” It basically prevents your email from looking spoofed (like a forgery). DKIM is the e-mail authentication standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to address one of the Internet’s biggest threats: e-mail fraud. As much as 80% of e-mail from leading brands, banks and ISPs is spoofed, at least according to the Online Trust Alliance (www.otalliance.org). DKIM is an important step in rebuilding consumer confidence in e-mail, because DKIM makes it hard (i.e., almost impossible) for evil, fraudulent spammers to send emails where they pretend to be someone else – like your bank – asking you to update your account information. Email protocols (like SMTP) do not include Authentication support, so a recipient of a message has no confidence that the message they are receiving is from whom it claims to be from. DKIM is a way to permit a receiver of a message to validate that a message is, in fact, from whom it claims to be from.
DKIM, which stands for “Domain Keys Identified Mail”, lets an organization insert a cryptographic signature on outbound e-mail and associate that signature with its domain name. The signature travels with the e-mail regardless of its path across the Internet. The recipient of the e-mail can use the signature to validate that the message came from the organization’s domain name. (If you’re a Pinpointe customer – you don’t have to worry – by default we use DKIM signing for all of your emails). DKIM won’t eliminate e-mail fraud altogether, but it will help companies that are targets of phishing scams to give their customers a way of ensuring they sent a particular message.
DKIM is a merger of two protocols: DomainKeys, which was created by Yahoo, and Identified Internet Mail, which was created by Cisco. These companies along with other ESP’s and ISPs work with the IETF’s DKIM working group on technical specifications. DKIM has been under development since 2004 and it’s finally reaching a critical mass: we expect to see Enterprises implement DKIM through 2009-’10.
DKIM Usage will Boom in 2009-10
DKIM adoption is accelerating, especially among banks, mortgage companies and insurance companies. It’s pretty easy for a corporation to go out and deploy DKIM because there are now enough commercial products that have DKIM support, and many Email Service providers (“ESP”s), like Pinpointe are now supporting DKIM authentication. Now that the standards are complete and compliant products are readily available, many enterprises will implement DKIM in their email systems in 2009. In order to ensure your emails are not blocked by these domains, you’ll want to ensure your emails are being sent with DKIM enabled.
If you want to learn more, we cover authentication and authorization (DKIM and SPF) in our recent Webinar: Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery Topics. Here are a few examples validating that DKIM is quickly gaining critical mass:
- BITS, a group of 100 of the largest U.S. financial institutions, last year recommended that its members adopt DKIM by October 2008. The fact that 100 large financial institutions are throwing their weight behind a standard together is going to help drive rapid DKIM adoption.
- BITS also recommends either Sender ID Framework (SIDF) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to validate that a received e-mail originates from an authorized mail server within a particular domain. (Read our Blog Tutorial on setting your SPF record correctly.)
- ISPs are adopting DKIM because they want to protect their customers against spam and phishing scams. E-mail senders are tying to protect their brands, identities and customers from phishing scams.
- Ebay, PayPal and banks in general have always attracted fraudsters and “phishers”, so PayPal and eBay are signing their e-mails with DKIM to battle what are called Phishing attacks. [link] Yahoo will block e-mails claiming to be sent by eBay and PayPal that haven’t been signed through DKIM.
