What is Sender Authentication?

The main benefit of sender authentication is to ensure that your company email addresses can’t be easily mimicked by attackers who might want to maliciously imitate you or other members of your team. It’s a small step you can take to provide a long-lasting benefit to your team’s data security, by preventing one of the most common cybersecurity attacks—when a company address is imitated by an attacker, hoping to phish you using a real name from your team. Even our own team has encountered this type of attack. 

Sender Authentication allows us to set a few criteria that help this process:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

A list of IP addresses authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain (so that Mailchimp, for example, would be allowed to send an email newsletter to your audience as though it was a member of your team). 

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

Adds a digital signature to your organization’s outgoing messages, linked to your domain’s internal DNS records. This is verified whenever you receive an email from your own domain, to ensure the content of that email hasn’t been tampered with during the sending process.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)

Allows your domain to specify additional authentication practices, and gives email recipients instructions on what to do if it fails any of the above criteria (such as to reject the message, quarantine it, or report it to IT). 

By enabling these rules, we can help automatically assure the legitimacy of emails that go out under your company’s name, and reduce the chances of your company’s domain (or your individual team members) from being used maliciously used in email attacks. 

Are You Using Sender Authentication?

Not sure if Sender Authentication is active for your company’s email? We can verify your team’s Sender Authentication Readiness, and work with you to make any necessary changes to better secure your email.