What Is DKIM and Why is it Important?

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a way to keep your company’s emails protected from phishing and spoofing. With the importance of keeping your business’ emails secure, it’s worth investing in it. Thankfully, a DKIM is a fairly quick and easy way of doing this. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s worth going through what it is and how it can help you.

What Is DKIM?

The first question you could hear yourself asking is, “what is DKIM?” If you’re not technologically savvy, it’s natural to be in this position. To put it briefly, it’s a way to make sure the person who sends you an email is actually who they say they are. It protects you from scams like phishing and spoofing.

Using a digital signature, it verifies the person sending you the email is the owner of the domain they claim to be associated with. It makes sure the [email protected] is genuinely associated with www.examplecompany.com, giving you greater peace of mind. You’ll rest assured your emails are protected.

At the same time, a DKIM helps prevent anyone pretending they’re associated with your brand or domain name when they’re not.

Why You Need DKIM

Now you know what DKIM is, you might wonder why you should use it. Keeping your business safe is the most obvious reason for this. Cyber crimes are more and more common, with more criminals now using the internet – and emails, specifically – to perform various crimes.

Spoofing trusted domains is one of the more notable ways they do this. You could find that someone will send you an email, claiming to be from one of your suppliers, for example. If you fall for it, you could end up downloading malicious software, which then affects your entire computer network.

Alternatively, someone could spoof your domain name and end up infecting or hacking into your suppliers’ or customers’ networks. Not only is that bad for them and their computers, but it could affect your company’s reputation.

DKIM helps prevent all of that, so you’ll have much less to worry about. See it as a way to keep your company and its reputation safe.

What’s Involved In It?

So, what’s actually involved in a DKIM check, and what would you need to do? Once you have it installed, you shouldn’t have to do anything. It’ll work in the background and do its job when needed. When it’s working, it looks for specific codes and signatures in each individual email to verify they’re the real deal.

It checks the email signature before comparing it to what the domain name’s signature should be. If it matches up, you’ll get the email with no problems. If not, it’ll be flagged.

How It Prevents Email Spoofing

You already know what is DKIM, but how does it actually work?

As complicated as it sounds, it’s much simpler than you would’ve thought. The protocol looks for a cryptographic signature in an email that’s always associated with a specific domain. It then verifies whether the signature actually matches up with the domain’s verified signature.

Usually, you can find a domain’s signature in its DNS record. You can then use a DKIM to decrypt the email’s signature to see if it matches up with what it should be. A high-quality DKIM does this check automatically for you. If things don’t match up, then the email will be seen as spam and you’ll be told to avoid it.

You might have to use a DKIM alongside a Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Compliance (DMARC) protocol for this to be truly effective. By using both, you’ll be truly sure that any email you receive isn’t a spoof or phishing attempt, giving you much greater protection.

DMARC and DKIM works in the background of your email, so you shouldn’t need to do much once implemented.

Protect Your Email With SaneChoice

Your company’s email, like the rest of your technology, should be kept secure. DKIM is one step to doing this, but why stop there? Why not take the time to keep everything safe by actually investing in protection? At SaneChoice, that’s exactly what we specialise in.

We’re here to look after your tech while you look after your business. Our experienced and qualified professionals are more than capable of preventing anything from happening. There’s no need to worry about your email or anything else.