SPF and DKIM within Email Marketing

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Definitions

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication standard developed by AOL that compares the email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorized to send mail from that domain. The IP list is published in the domain’s DNS record.

DKIM is an Internet standards track standard and deprecates DomainKeys

Application

For all messages containing community content and for clients without a private IP, Encompass signs all email with DKIM to improve deliverability with recipient domains.

Because your domain in the ‘from’ field will not be @imodules.com, it will not have the proper DNS record to authenticate the e-mail. Because of this, the Sender header is modified e-mail can then be properly authenticated.

If you wish for DKIM and your from address to match, you must purchase a private IP or work with your Encompass representative to enable white labeling.

  • White labeling is only available for messages sent through email marketing that does not contain community content.
  • As part of the white label process, your IT department must create one sub-domain (such as email.yourdomain.com) for click and open tracking and another for the Return-Path email header. SPF uses the domain value in the Return-Path header for the DNS lookup to determine the permitted senders for the domain.

Impact on Mail Delivery

For standards like SPF and DKIM / DomainKeys, whether they improve deliverability or bypass filters is entirely at the discretion of the validating receivers. It is expected that messages from a sender with a good reputation (reputation is based solely on IP) would be subject to less scrutiny by the receiver’s filters. In other words, omitting these standards usually doesn’t hurt, but providing them can only help deliverability.