Worried about emails getting altered in transit between the sending and recipient servers? Well, most marketers often come across this situation, creating a loophole in their email marketing campaigns. The rising number of hackers and malicious emails from them has put even trusted brands at risk. The digital marketing industry has developed a new tool that can be implemented in your DNS to authenticate emails from your domain to address this issue.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), an email security standard, has been designed to make your emails appear more legitimate to your recipients so that they do not end up in the spam folder. It also protects your domain from spoofing and campaigns from phishing. DKIM is compatible with all existing email infrastructure and works with SPF and DMARC to create multiple security layers for domains sending emails. By using public-key cryptography, DKIM signs emails with a private key as it gets shipped. The recipient servers then use a public key published to a domain’s DNS to verify the message’s source and make sure that the body of the message remains unchanged during the transit. Once the signature gets verified with the public key by the recipient server, the message passes DKIM, and the recipients receive authentic emails from your brand. Thus, DKIM increases your email deliverability rate.
Using DKIM helps improve your sender reputation and ISPs and use it to build a reputation on your domain over time. As DKIM reduces your spam and bounce rate with high engagement, your domain develops an excellent sending reputation with ISPs, which improves deliverability.
But remember, DKIM does not encrypt your message’s contents, and many ESPs use opportunistic TLS to encrypt messages as they move between sender and recipients. The DKIM signature will remain in the email headers but won’t encrypt the content of the message.
How to Protect Your Domain’s Email with DKIM
With DKIM, you get double protection as it uses two different actions to verify your messages. The first action takes place on the server sending DKIM signed emails, and the second happens on the recipient server checking DKIM signatures on incoming messages. The pairing of the private and public key controls the entire process. The private key is kept secret and safe on your server or ESP, which signs each message as it is sent. And the public key is added to the DNS records for your domain to broadcast it and help verify your messages. The mail systems start DKIM verification by making sure the version number meets the DKIM specification, and the identity of the sender’s domain matches the domain set in the signature.
You can generate the private and public key on your own with your mail server as well. When a message is sent, it creates a hash from the message headers’ content and then uses the private key to sign the hash and validate the message. The signature gets computed and added to the outgoing email headers to assure that the message has not been modified in transit. The public key decrypts the encrypted hash sent, and the receiving mail server then computes its hash. If both the hash matches, the message is let through.
Rotate Your DKIM Keys for Better Performance
Rotating your DKIM keys every quarter by adding your new keys and removing your old keys DNS records for your domain increases your DKIM performance. You can also layer DKIM with SPF and DMARC to secure your domain’s email.
Implementing the DKIM standard improves email deliverability and protects your domain against malicious emails sent on behalf of your domains. This email authentication technique allows the receiver to check if an email was sent and authorized by the owner of that domain by giving the email a digital signature.
When your emails get a DKIM signature as a header that is added to the message and is secured with encryption, your email marketing campaigns will achieve immense success.
