Having gotten off to a sleepy start with primarily government and educational institutions in 1982, email's recent explosive commercial growth has made obvious some needs that could not have been realistically anticipated nearly 25 years ago.
The ability to forge the point of origin of an email is arguably one of the biggest contributors to the flood of illegitimate email today. Enter email authentication.
What is email authentication?
Email authentication processes refer back to an identified authority to determine if an email message is truly from the origin identified. Most of the current authentication methodologies refer back to the published DNS records of the sender that are authoritatively controlled by the domain owner.
ISPs and email clients are starting to provide prompts or flags in the user's inbox depending on whether the message was authenticated or not. For example, should a message not be authenticated, a recipient may be prompted to proceed with greater caution before responding or clicking links within the message. Consequently, senders who authenticate are viewed more favorably by both ISPs and recipients.
This is not the end of SPAM
Email authentication alone will not provide an end to spam. Authentication will do a good job of quickly reducing the number of phishing scandals and attacks. It's important to understand that email authentication is one of the first steps in more sophisticated processes that can help identify and verify what address an email message is coming from. Reputation systems will become an important step in this process, reducing SPAM by filtering bad messages more effectively.
Delivery is still important
Just as authentication does not stop all spam, it does not guarantee delivery of your email messages either. Even if you are authenticating correctly, ISPs can and will filter messages based on content, and, more importantly, reputation. Authentication only helps to identify and verify that email messages are actually coming from the stated sender.
Email authentication has reached critical mass, and it will continue to grow in importance for email delivery. Armed with the knowledge you need about authentication in our new whitepaper, Email Authentication: 10 Things You Should Know, you should be able to successfully navigate the waters of email authentication.
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