|
By Cara Garretson
Last week Google announced in a blog post that is has added authentication capabilities to Google Apps,
allowing users to sign outgoing mail messages so they’re less likely to get
caught in spam filters.
By implementing DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) at no
additional cost to Google Apps users, the company says it is giving email
senders a way to validate who they are in a manner that spam filters recognize,
therefore ensuring higher message delivery rates to recipients.
“Email authentication is an important mechanism to verify
senders’ identities, giving users a tool to recognize potential spam messages,”
reads the blog post, penned by Adam Dawes, Google enterprise product manager. “In
addition, many mail systems can display whether a received message is
DKIM-verified, which helps spam filters verify and assess the overall reputation
of the sender’s domain: messages from untrusted senders are treated more
skeptically than those from good senders.”
Effective immediately, Google Apps administrators can enable
DKIM signing for outgoing messages by using the Advanced Tools tab in the
control panel. As more email vendors support DKIM signing and other
authentication technologies, it will become easier to separate good mail messages
from bogus ones, Dawes says.
Because spammers can forge the “from” address on email messages,
additional steps such as digital signatures are required to verify where a
message was sent from. Signed messages include information in the header of the
message that recipients can match with the sender’s domain signature to verify
the message is coming from the domain it says it is, and to ensure that the
information hasn’t been changed en route, says Google. With DKIM, outbound
messages include a digital signature and generate a domain key that Google Apps
uses to create encrypted mail headers that are unique to the sender’s domain.
The public key is then added to the Domain Name System (DNS) records for that
domain, so that recipients can verify the sender of the message by using the
public key to decrypt the header, says Google.
The DKIM standard emerged in 2005 as a combination of Yahoo’s
DomainKeys and Cisco’s Identified Internet mail specifications, and has been
approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as “a method for
validating a domain name identity that is associated with a message through
cryptographic authentication,” according to the DKIM.org web site.
Google has been offering DKIM as a sending option for Gmail
users since the product launched in 2004, writes Dawes. As for helping verify
incoming mail from Gmail accounts, Google in 2008 began working with eBay and
PayPal to authenticate their mail with DKIM, and therefore block all unsigned
messages that appeared to be coming from those companies addressed to Gmail
users.
Google says that because its Apps platform is cloud-based, adding
options such as DKIM can be done easily and inexpensively.
“Google Apps is the first major email platform – including
on-premises providers – to offer simple DKIM signing at no extra cost,” says
Dawes. “Once again, the power of the cloud has made it possible for us to bring
this feature to millions of customers quickly and affordably.”
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
