Several months ago, we warned of pending changes to gmail, hotmail, outlook and a host of other services. That time is now. They are now requiring a SPF record, DKIM record, and are recommending a DMARC record. These are TXT entries made into your DNS server. If you have incorrect or missing entries, sending an email for delivery is either intermittent, or stops entirely. Here are the 3 records, and what they do.
SPF
SPF is used to authenticate the sender, and ensure that only
specific, authorized servers can send emails for your domain. This
makes it much harder for someone else to pretend to be you and
send out emails in your name.
DKIM
DKIM is used to verify that messages haven’t been tampered with in
transit. Because email is generally sent as a plain text, someone
could intercept your email, change it, and release the modified
version to an unsuspecting recipient. Think like a criminal. If you
send out an invoice or bill, they could change the “send a check to”
address. They’d get the payment due to you, you would not be paid,
and your customer would still owe the bill amount. DKIM makes this
much harder to accomplish.
DMARC
DMARC suggests what to do with mail that isn’t legitimate. It tells a
sending server what is wrong with an email. You can set it to pass
suspect emails, or delete them automatically. You can also set it up
to alert you about suspect emails on a daily, weekly or monthly
basis.
For our customers, we automatically set SPF and DKIM, and upon
request will set up DMARC.
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