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Spam Folders – Why Authenticate Your Email

Ransomware Network Security Protection

Spam folders can be pure frustration and your superhero all in one technology.

We’ve all had the spam folders conversation – Did you get my email? (wait 20 minutes) Oh, your message was in my spam folder. Or perhaps you were sending out that important proposal and chewed your fingernails into nubs while wondering whether they got it or not – because it was weird to add a read receipt.

Thankfully, SPAM Filtering services have come a long way in the last decade and these services don’t rely on just heuristic filtering, or just looking for keywords like Rolex, Nigerian prince, enlargement or any other famous scams. With the increase in the use of cloud email services like Office 365, email security only gets more and more difficult to bypass for average people unaware of what the problem is.

This is because most SPAM filtering services do a lot of work/scanning before you even see one email hit your inbox. Good SPAM filters look for where your email originated from while also looking for viruses, phishing attempts, ads, and anything else that looks suspect. However, one of the big reasons your email probably goes into spam folders,is because it isn’t authenticated.

Huh? Yah, I know. For the average person, how to resolve this issue can be close to impossible without a managed it services provider like Network Medics or a friendly neighborhood spider…tech.

Although you cannot control the recipient’s email service, you can control yours in regards to being authenticated.

If you use a corporate domain such as networkmedics.com instead of a cloud provider like gmail.com, yahoo, etc., (recommended) authenticating your email makes your chances much higher of getting through most spam filters as authentication lends a greater degree of trust to your message.

There are several forms of email authentication that are important to have in place today. They are industry standard for professional email servers to check on before accepting an email:

1) SENDER POLICY FRAMEWORK (SPF) – This means the recipient’s email server takes a peek at where your email was sent from. In order for it to be accepted – the sending location has to match the record located in your DNS Records. E.g. Network Medics email server resides in Minnesota, if a spam message is sent as NetworkMedics.com but it was sent from Russia, any spam filter that looks at SPF records will decline it.

2) DOMAIN KEYS IDENTIFIED MAIL (DKIM) – DKIM ensures that an email has not been tampered with while crossing the web. DKIM is essentially a wax seal on a letter. If the seal remains sealed upon delivery, it was securely transported.

3) DOMAIN-BASED MESSAGE AUTHENTICATION REPORTING AND CONFORMANCE (DMARC) – DMARC is a sophisticated authentication method that leverages both SPF and DKIM to prevent email spoofing (forging a sender address).

Having authenticated email is only going to get more important to have established as the days fly by. If you need help establishing any email authentication methods to get your emails out of your customer’s spam folders, then please reach out to us today at 612.315.7108 and we can review with you.