It is still one of the most used techniques in the business environment, but it is also frequently used to carry out cyber attacks and spoofing that can damage your reputation. Without going any further, according to Kaspersky, in the last 3 months in Spain, 9.67% of users were victims of a phishing attack.
What happens when you send an email?
By pressing the Send button from your email manager such as , Outlook or Yahoo, you connect to a server using an SMTP protocol (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) that receives the message and then sends it to its recipients.
Nevertheless, SMTP lacks a function that allows you to identify the origin of an email. This gap is exploited by cybercriminals to send malicious mail, impersonate identities and make it difficult to trace back to its origin.
To avoid this, a series of protocols and security standards to authenticate electronic. The 3 most used are the following:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
- Domain Keys Identified Mail
- Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance()
What is SPF and how does it work?
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication protocol that allows you to specify who can send emails from a certain domain. To do this, the domain owner defines a SPF recordwhat is a .txt file hosted on DNS in which the IP addresses authorized to send emails are listed.
Before an email is delivered, the recipient’s email server check if the IP address from which the email was received is in the SPF record. If this is correct, it is added in the email header that the verification is positive. If the verification is negative, the email could be sent to the spam folder or simply not delivered.
Because it is important?
These are the main reasons why you should apply the SPF protocol in your emails:
Protect your reputation
The SPF helps to hinder the work of cybercriminals who try to supplant the identity of your company, preventing emails from being sent on your behalf that have not left your servers. Without SPF, cases of spam, phishing or spoofing could be generated that would seriously affect the reputation of your domain.
Increase the rate of openings
Prevent emails sent from your domain from being marked as spam. Without SPF, email servers that appear to come from your domain cannot be authenticated by email servers and may be sent to the spam folder and never opened.
Considerations to take into account
The SPF protocol, although useful, also has the following limitations:
- Single SPF record:a domain can only have one SPF record. Otherwise, you’ll get a message that the SPF record could not be interpreted.
- Updated record: It is essential that you maintain your SPF record correctly configured and updateda task that can be very laborious, especially if you often change servers or hosting companies.
- Forwarding: By forwarding an email, you become the new sender and will not get positive verification from the new recipient’s server. SPF is broken.
- Does not guarantee delivery: The SPF protocol helps to authenticate the domain from which emails are sent but does not guarantee that they will pass the authentication. To properly protect your emails, remember to implement it together with the DKIM and DMARC authentication protocols.
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