What is an email authentication, and why is it necessary? In simple words, it is a technical approach to demonstrate that an email is not duplicated. It offers a means to confirm that an email comes from who it pretends to be from.

How To Authenticate Your Emails?

In general, we use the word “email authentication” to refer to technical measures that make this confirmation feasible. The most commonly used email authentication measures are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

These email authentication standards were created to improve SMTP, the primary protocol used to send an email because SMTP does not itself include any authentication mechanisms.

According to Vali Mail, more than 4.8 billion inboxes now support email authentication through DMARC, showing 76% of the current total number of worldwide email accounts. Let’s discuss more email authentication and why it is essential.

What is Email Authentication?

As part of the mailing process, receiving mail servers manage your email’s authenticity and legitimacy.

When a mail server receives your email, it generally asks, “Is this email from who it says it’s from? How do I check that? What to do if the email is not authenticated?”

Receiving mail servers will also look at the sending reputations correlated with the sending domain and sending IP. Informational content, past engagement for your sends among their users, and other factors also factor in whether your email will successfully get delivered to the proposed inboxes.

Why is Email Authentication Essential?

As more and more people engage with email authentication, it results in email’s advanced use as a platform for duplicity, spam, and spoofing.

Consequently, more strict measures are being followed by ISPs and receiving mailboxes to secure their users from spam and phishing emails. Implementing more robust strategies by ISPs and an increased need for authentication for successful delivery is one part of that combined force.

As more and more ISPs adopt stricter procedures, senders without authentication will face inbox placement problems and may find themselves at risk.

As an entrepreneur, email authentication is as crucial for email marketing as the quality of your list or your design and content’s strength.

Authenticate Your Email in 5 Easy Steps

As a business owner, you need to increase your email conversion rate to generate more leads. Email authentication can help your business manage your brand reputation and customer trust in your brand.

With this in mind, let’s discuss how you can authenticate your email in 5 easy steps.

1. Use Consistent Sender Address

To succeed in the email authentication process, you need to be consistent with the addresses and friendly from the names you use. It can even help you grow your email list.

Constantly switching from names and from addresses can make your customers be more sensitive to phishing.

Likewise, avoid using cousin domains or domains that are slightly different from your standard brand’s domain, as this also disintegrates trust in your messages and trains recipients to be more susceptible to phishing attacks.

For example, if your domain is xyz.com, you should never use a similar domain like xyzmail.com.

2. Authenticate Your IP With SPF

SPF refers to Sender Policy Framework, and it matches the email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses allowed to send mail from that domain. The SPF record is attached to a sender’s domain name system (DNS) and includes a list of confirmed IP addresses.

3. Configure DKIM Signatures

DKIM signing improves email security and helps prevent email spoofing. It is recommended to use your own DKIM key on all the messages.

If you don’t create your own DKIP domain key, Gmail signs all outgoing messages with this default DKIM domain key: d=*.gappssmtp.com.

Messages transmitted from servers outside of mail.google.com won’t be approved with the default DKIM key.

4. Safeguard Your Domain With DMARC Authentication

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, which uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to block messages spoofed by phishers.

DMARC can help your business and clients by blocking the malicious emails send on their part. With DMARC, you can gain insight into their email channel.

DMARC can help protect against:

• Brand abuse and scams
• Malware attacks
• Phishing on customers of the company
• Employees from spear phishing

5. Be ready for BIMI

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) relies on other email authentication technologies such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

To perform BIMI, you will need to do the following things:

• Execute DMARC at enforcement (p=quarantine or p=reject)
• Create the appropriate SVG image that matches the standard of tiny – PS (Portable Secure)
• Get a VMC for your logo
• Execute the needed DNS records for BIMI

Once you’ve implemented the required DNS arrangement, your logo will be assessed by the recipient’s Mailbox provider. When it meets their precise standards, the logo will be displayed to the end-user.

Summing Up

By practicing email authentication, you are alleviating the possibilities for email fraud targeting your brand and helping your emails reach your followers.

If you have not yet embraced email authentication, now is the time to do it. This will help you stay of the spam folder and have a much higher chance of hitting your subscribers’ inboxes.