What is the DKIM check and why is it important to your business

1. What is the DKIM check and why is it important to your business? Protecting against email phishing attempts and other cybersecurity threats is more critical than ever, especially when faced with regulatory compliance requirements. As a result, we've focused on one fundamental technology, DKIM, which helps safeguard employees, partners, and clients from email scams. Here's what you need to know about DKIM and why it matters. What is the DKIM check? DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), often known as the DKIM check, is an email verification technique that allows the recipient to verify that an email was received and authorised by the domain's owner, thus ensuring its legitimacy. The DKIM signature is used to give the email a digital signature. The DKIM signature is an encrypted string that the recipient's email server can check against your domain's public DNS information. DKIM signatures are usually validated at the server level, and the findings aren't shown to the end receiver directly. The email arrives in the inbox as usual, but it has a greater chance of passing SPAM filters and other security checks, thanks to the verification procedure. When a receiving system determines that an email has a valid DKIM signature, it's safe to assume that the email's message and attachments haven't been edited or modified. How DKIM works in practice How, exactly, does DKIM work to protect us in our email communications? Let's explore.

2. The domain administrator creates a public/private key pair first. The public key is stored on the transmitting mail transfer agent's(MTA) internal server, while the private key is added to their DNS record. When an email is sent, the MTA produces a Hash Value that represents the email's contents, encrypts it with its private key, and then adds the resulting value to the email's header records, along with the hash technique used. The destination MTA will look up the public DKIM key in the transmitting domain's DNS records after receiving the email, then use it to decode the encrypted hash value. Finally, it calculates the Hash Value of the email on its own and compares the two hashes; if they match, the receiving MTA knows that the email came from the sending domain and was not altered in transit. The recipient can be confident that an email that passes DKIM verification really was sent by the domain shown. How to test your DKIM: Let’s get technical You can test DKIM by sending an email to a Gmail account, then accessing it in the web app and selecting "display original" from the "respond" option. If you see "signed by along with your domain name" in the original format, your DKIM signature is legitimate. DKIM is a two-pronged strategy. Either it's working, and you can easily verify the signature, or it's not, and something is wrong. If you're having problems with these types of errors, we have a few suggestions to help you solve the problem.

3. Advantages of DKIM Aside from the apparent benefits of the DKIM system, such as email verification, the user can also benefit from certain other features. 1. Be more reputable When you use DKIM across all of your organization's domains, you establish yourself as a trustworthy sender in the eyes of potential partners, consumers, business associates, and any other third-party service you may encounter. When you sign your emails with DKIM, they become more transparent, and they are less likely to land up in the spam folder. When there's an extra layer of trust in your signature that customers can see, it raises the likelihood that they'll click on the links you're delivering without fear of phishing attacks. 2. Avoid spam filters While the DKIM system is not an anti-spam system in the strictest sense, configuring it will considerably increase the odds of your message not being marked as spam. If your emails aren't reaching their intended recipients, it's possible that the DNS record is incorrectly configured or that you're missing critical records like SPF, DKIM, or DMARC. 3. Bypass phishing When authenticating the sender of a specific email you received, using DKIM authentication will assist put your mind at ease.

4. To prepare for the fight against phishing attempts, ensure that all domains in your organisation are using DKIM and SPF, as previously suggested. Final thoughts on DKIM To summarise, implementing DKIM is a significant and straightforward addition to your email security system, and we strongly encourage you to do so. At Emailauth, security is at the heart of what we do, and we consider it a primary priority to keep your data safe from outside attacks. (For more information on our security procedures, including how we use DKIM to sign outbound emails, see our security page.)