DKIM is an abbreviation for Domain Keys Identified Mail and it is a factor of strengthening authenticity of your e-mail. It is simply a procedure of signing your mail with digital signature for proving authenticity.
It’s generated using a hashed string algorithm which is applied to the content of certain signed fields. It can only be seen when you have a special unique public key that you obtain when generating a hashed string. When the receiver wants to read the e-mail it’s needs to recover or precisely obtain the hash code (public key) through DNS. Then in decrypts it and shows you the original sent message. It’s just a added degree of security and authenticity to your mail so you know it wasn’t changed by any means in the process of sending and delivering the mail to it (it is exactly what you wrote with no possible changes).
Why is DKIM important
As we mentioned before, DKIM is a service for authenticating(adding) digital signatures to your e-mails to prevent them for being phished. But, why is DKIM so important and is it really that useful?
Well, it all depends on your preferences, some people may say they don’t need to mess with DKIM because the sender needs to set it up, the receiver, and then the process of decrypting the message etc. And they’ll probably say why do I need it, I don’t send anything important. Well, you’re right in a way and in a way you’re wrong, here is why…
Still, the DKIM encryption can be avoided. If you take a example – driver’s license; it just says that it’s you, and it doesn’t say anything about your previous records, experience etc. The same thing goes with DKIM. If you get decrypted, anybody can pretend it’s you on the Internet. That’s why DKIM needs incorporation and implementation with many other programs, which are still in development, but it all starts with DKIM. Email senders should start using DKIM as soon as feasible so that they and their customers can reap the benefits. Email receivers should start verifying DKIM signatures so next-generation antispam and antiphishing tools can leverage that information to deliver better results. And end users should ask their email providers what they are doing to deploy email authentication and restore trust in Internet e-mail. It is also important in email marketing, as the polls say, there are 107 trillion emails sent to 1.88 billion email users.
A lot of email servers decided to use DKIM for their encryption such as Gmail, Yahoo etc.
According to a survey of 2010 out of 294 billion emails sent every day in that only 32 billion are legitimate email and rest 262 billion emails are marked as spam. Email service provider are heavily fighting against filtering spam and forged email with the help of the authentication method.
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