E-mail Authentication

Image by Andrea Stöckel,

E-mail Authentication has become more and more important in e-mail infrastructure. There are technical aspects that make this topic a bit difficult to quickly understand, unless you work with these technologies on a regular basis. What you need to know is that e-mail authentication is now critical to your e-mail infrastructure. Large e-mail hosting services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and others rely on e-mail authentication services to prune out a lot of the spam out there.

If you send a lot of e-mail, you may find large e-mail providers will simply stop accepting your e-mail if e-mail authentication mechanisms are not in place.

E-mail authentication consists of a number of technologies to allow mail servers to verify the legitimacy of an e-mail message. It establishes trust between senders and recipients by ensuring the sender is authenticated in some way. The current e-mail authentication core mechanisms are:

See also..

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)
• IP-based Reverse Address Validation (IP-REV)