CitrusMail - DKIM

About Domainkeys for Internet Mail (DKIM)

DKIM is an Internet standard for email authentication which offers near end-to-end integrity checking for email messages. Email senders digitally sign their outgoing messages and these cryptographic signatures are verified by the recipient's receiving mail server.

DKIM provides businesses with an industry standard solution to the risks associated with using Internet email. By ensuring that all email you send is electronically signed, your business reputation and brand are automatically protected.

The DKIM base specification is being spearheaded by Sendmail, Inc. in conjunction with Cisco and Yahoo! and has already been adopted by Google and eBay.

DKIM has been designed for quick, easy and low-cost implementation. It has these basic features:

• Message signatures are placed in message headers to avoid the confusion often created when signatures are part of the body text.
• No new infrastructure requirements.
• Pure server-side implementation, no changes required to existing email clients.
• Incremental deployment.

The CitrusMail Solution

DKIM is an emerging industry-wide solution for authenticating email identities and message content. CitrusMail offers an easy to use and complete implementation of DKIM.

CitrusMail is Citrus IT's flagship email filtering and availability service. Enabling DKIM for your CitrusMail service is as simple as choosing the protection level you desire and pressing go. If your DNS is also hosted by Citrus IT then the required records will automatically be published on your behalf. Simple!

Why Should You Implement DKIM Now?

Simply, to protect you against fraud. Without DKIM anyone on the Internet can send email purporting to be from anyone else. This type of email forgery is currently used for unsolicited mail (spam), as recipients tend to trust well known and established domain names, and increasingly for Phishing scams.

DKIM is an Internet Engineering Task Force specification which was approved as a Standards Track document (RFC4871) on 23rd May 2007. Leading ISPs are already working closely with the authors of the specification and DKIM will be rapidly adopted.

Benefits of DKIM

DKIM:

• increases email delivery rates;
• protects your business brand;
• protects you against fraud and forgery;
• provides a level of trust in your electronic communications - any recipient will know if a message has been tampered with in transit and if it really did originate from you.
• begins to address the growing spam problem.