Lesson plan
Email authentication
Email authentication, or validation, is a collection of techniques aimed at providing verifiable information about the origin of email messages by validating the domain ownership of any message transfer agents (MTA) who participated in transferring and possibly modifying a message. The original base of Internet email, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), has no such feature, so forged sender addresses in emails (a practice known as email spoofing) have been widely used in phishing, email spam, and various types of frauds. To combat this, many competing email authentication proposals have been developed. three had been widely adopted – SPF, DKIM and DMARC. The results of such validation can be used in automated email filtering, or can assist recipients when selecting an appropriate action. This article does not cover user authentication of email submission and retrieval.
Article summary
Email authentication, or validation, is a collection of techniques aimed at providing verifiable information about the origin of email messages by validating the domain ownership of any message transfer agents (MTA) who participated in transferring and possibly modifying a message. The original base of Internet email, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), has no such feature, so forged sender addresses in emails (a practice known as email spoofing) have been widely used in phishing, email spam, and various types of frauds. To combat this, many competing email authentication proposals have been developed. three had been widely adopted – SPF, DKIM and DMARC. The results of such validation can be used in automated email filtering, or can assist recipients when selecting an appropriate action. This article does not cover user authentication of email submission and retrieval.
Key claims
No claims recorded.
Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
No sources recorded.
Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.