DKIM For Email: What Is It, And How Does It Work?


Email security is critical for protecting your business, brand, and customers from phishing and other malicious activities. DKIM, or Domain Keys Identified Mail, is a popular method for authenticating and verifying emails sent from your domain. DKIM works by adding a digital signature to the emails you send, making it much harder for malicious actors to spoof your domain and send malicious emails to your customers. 

What Is DKIM?


Domain Keys Identified Mails a technique that uses the registered domain name of your mail to generate a digital signature so your users recognize it’s in fact you sending those emails and they've been unchanged in transit.


Why Does DKIM Matter?


DKIM helps ensure email delivery, having partnered with the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) policies to prevent mail spoofing.

Then, a fraudster might create an email that apparently came from you by using an aliased email address. As an example, scammers might create email messages that appear to be from your CEO, and can also send emails that look like they come from your customers.

Scam artists can take advantage of email messages to trick victims by pretending they are from known companies, including financial institutions. Email spoofing is used in phishing, spear phishing, and business email compromise attacks.

Email receiving servers often hope incoming emails have SPF and DKIM signatures in order to correctly classify them as authentic. If an email lacks them, it may be misclassified as spam and no further action taken. DKIM can help to improve the quality of your email correspondence.


How Does DKIM Work?


Using asymmetric encryption, DKIM creates a pair of public and private keys used to encode and decode email messages. The app publishes the public key as a DNS record in the sending domain's domain records TXT section. The app uses a private key to generate your email's distinctive digital signature.

Using your secret key and the contents of the email, an algorithm generates a unique signature as part of the email s headers.

When a configured outbound server sends a message, the server generates and attaches a DKIM signature header that contains two cryptographic hashes. One of these hashes corresponds to the header for which the hash was calculated, while the other applies to the message content. The DKIM header also contains information about how the signature was generated.

When the SMTP server receives an email with such a signature within the header, the server asks the domain's DNS server for the public key TXT record. Using the public key, the receiver can verify if the email was actually sent from that domain name and not changed in transit.




If the sending email service provider does not validate the domain name for the legitimacy of the message or does not recognize the signature, they may tag the email as spam or blacklist the sender's IP address altogether. This makes it more difficult for fraudulent senders to forge messages so that they appear to be from your domain.

How to Set Up Your DKIM Record


You’ll need to:

  • Install a DKIM package onto your email service's server.
  • Create a public and private key pair
  • Create a DKIM-TXT record to publish the DKIM selector and your public key.
  • Check your DKIM setup to confirm that DKIM is functioning correctly.

At the end, you will have a DKIM record in your DNS that looks like this:

<selector(s=)._domainkey.domain(d=)>. TXT v=DKIM1; (p=)<public key>

At the end, DKIM is a powerful email authentication protocol that reduces the risk of email spoofing and phishing attacks. By signing emails with a digital signature, it helps ensure that the messages were sent from the sender’s authorized domain and have not been tampered with in transit. With a few simple steps, you can add DKIM to your domain and start using it to verify the authenticity of your emails. This will help protect your organization against malicious activity and increase the reputation of its email sender.

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