Now that the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) has approved the DKIM signature specification as an Internet standard, several people have since asked me what this means. I figured I should write something to explain what I’m thinking.
What the IESG approval means is that the DKIM signature document is now an official industry standard. This should send a signal to vendors and implementers who’ve been sitting on the fence. It says, “It’s ok to make DKIM products and services now - we’re done changing things.” What I’d hope to see is an accelerated proliferation of DKIM capable products and services. That’s a Good Thing. The more companies we have adopting authentication technology in general, and DKIM in particular, the better our efforts will be toward combating those individuals who seek to harm others through malicious use of email.
Authentication is the foundation required in order to get domain based reputation off the ground. When that occurs, the benefits to senders and receivers will be tremendous. But even without formalized reputation assessments, DKIM has benefits. With DKIM alone, one can know for certain that a message not only claims to be - but that it actually was - sent through paypal.com, as an example - helping to fight Phishing scams. With DKIM alone, one can determine that a message has arrived unaltered - byte-for-byte - as the sender intended - helping businesses reclaim trust with their customers. I am perplexed by how little attention this core feature of DKIM is understood. With DKIM alone, one can setup internal Whitelists such that authenticated messages from approved sources don’t waste time in “false-positive” prone spam filters - helping messages get to their intended recipients more efficiently.
My friends, this is real progress!
To this day, I consider my involvement in the creation of DKIM to be one of the major highs in my career as both someone involved in the email business for over 10 years and as a developer of email software that is used around the world today.
The DKIM work is not over yet. Even though the base specification is now an official standard we have more work to do in the market through promoting adoption and deployment of this standard.
Email is a powerful communication tool that has become an important part of our business and our lives. And as CEO of Alt-N Technologies, I am committed to doing all I can to keeping us focused on providing small-to-medium businesses with the most feature-rich, affordable, and secure messaging solutions in the industry.
Stay tuned. We’re not finished yet!