Email authentication is probably something you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. But it’s important that you understand what it is and why it's crucial for your email deliverability.
This episode gets a little technical, but if you’re sending emails to a list, you should become familiar with the jargon so you can leverage all of the options available to you when trying to improve your deliverability.
In this episode, we talk about why authentication exists, how to quickly determine authentication, and the three types of authentication you should become familiar with.
Main Takeaways
- Authentication exists to verify that a specific message is coming from a specific sender. This prevents spam and phishing and makes email more secure.
- Your email address has two from addresses: 1) the friendly-from that the receiver sees, and 2) the return-path, which is your Email Service Provider’s (ESP) domain.
- The quick way of determining authentication is to send yourself an email and pull the message headers.
- Three Types of Authentication:
- SPF — Essentially a list of IP addresses that are allowed to send mail on behalf of your domain.
- DKIM — Uses a public key and a private key to verify the sender.
- DMARC — Ties SPF and DMARC to the friendly-from domain that receivers actually see. It’s not for everyone, but highly secure. It’s also technical and requires upkeep.
“We want to make sure that you're passing authentication. This isn't something that you need to have a huge technical background for. You can do some testing from your account to make sure that you're passing what you need to pass and that you don't need to add or take away anything. ” ~ @alyssa_dulin
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