About email authentication
Email authentication helps validate who is sending emails. Email authentication methods can help protect your domain, your brand, your reputation, as well as help improve deliverability overall.
Email authentication helps to reduce the effectiveness of two types of malicious attacks:
- Spoofing: A method of forging another entity's identity (for example the from address) onto an email so that users will open a message.
- Phishing: A method of tricking recipients into giving out personal information, such as credit card numbers or account passwords. Often this involves spoofing the origins of the email and the attacker poses as a familiar and trusted contact, such as a bank, a credit card company, or a familiar merchant.
The key methods of email authentication used today are:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - An open standard for preventing sender address forgery.
- Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) - A cryptographic signature-based method to authenticate email senders.
- Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) - Standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication using the SPF and DKIM mechanisms.
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) - Refers to encryption of web traffic between Oracle’s server and the recipient’s server. TLS enhances the privacy between sender and recipient.
Oracle Eloqua supports all of these authentication protocols. Learn more about these authentication methods and how they are implemented.