Email Authentication

01 Email authentication is the backbone of every successful email marketing campaign. It determines your email deliverability. ISPs like Gmail and Yahoo use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC signals to decide whether your email will land in the inbox or the spam folder. If you set up proper email authentication, it will protect your sender reputation, improve deliverability, and also confirm your domain is legitimate.

02 Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) verifies the legitimacy of the domain from which the email was sent. Meanwhile, information is exchanged by means of Encryption (TLS) to ensure its protection during transmission from one mail server to another. Although both methods need to be employed in email marketing, inbox providers first check for authentication before delivering the email.

03 If the authentication is unsuccessful, ISPs can decide to reject your emails, which means your subscribers will not get access to your emails. Your domain can be blacklisted leading to the deterioration of your reputation as a sender for a long time after some time of getting into blackout. The absence of proper authentication gives fraudsters the ability to impersonate you and send phishing emails in your name.

04 Usually, authentication issues originate in the DNS, so you should check your DNS at first if something goes wrong. Use either MXToolbox or Google Admin Toolbox to find out all problems with your configuration (or their absence) concerning DKIM, SPF and DMARC.