The email authentication section of the hosting account control panel is something of a hidden gem. Email authentication is important as it addresses one of the major problems related to email sending technology, allowing recipient systems to verify whether a message has actually been sent by the domain in the ‘from’ field. Blackfoot provides the following two methods of email authentication to help allow recipient servers identify any spam, spoofing and phishing email that is forged to appear to come from your domain name.
- DomainKeys
- SPF
You can enable these using ‘Email Management Tools’ within the account control panel which can be accessed at http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/cpanel
When SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is enabled recipient servers can verify that the mail server sending the messages is listed by the domain owner as legitimate to send emails from the domain name that displays as the sender of the message. Provided that you send all email from your domain via the SMTP server provided with your Blackfoot account (or have added all the servers you use to send mail from your domain to your SPF record ) we would advise that the ‘All’ option be selected.
When DomainKeys is enabled, a digital signature (a key) will be added to the header of the message and recipient servers can then perform a DNS look-up to verify that the digital signature is authentic. DomainKeys will be replaced in the near future with the more recent DKIM method.
These methods allow recipient servers to confidently reject messages not sent via your account with ourselves and to confidently deliver your own messages directly to the recipients inbox.