DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail and was designed to help ISPs prevent malicious email senders by validating the “from” specific domains of the email.
Spoofers and phishers can be sending email to unwitting recipients by purporting to be from a trusted brand or sender. By “signing” email with DKIM, legitimate senders can label which domains belong to them, and by doing so, empower ISPs to block email streams that have not been properly authenticated using DKIM.
As one of the most popular email authentication methodologies, it works by using cryptographic technology that adds a digital signature to your message header. This DKIM signature validates and authorizes your domain name in the eyes of the receiver. The DKIM signature is created using a unique string of characters stored as a public key.
When your email is received, the public key is retrieved through the DNS and decrypted by the receiver to allow them to confidently verify the identity of your domain.
Q4 has selected SendGrid as our best-in-class partner for email delivery as they have helped thousands of companies follow email best practices to ensure maximum delivery and security. Sendgrid automatically enables DKIM for all emails to improve email deliverability.
Q4 also utilizes a set of dedicated / reserved IP addresses which are only used for Q4 clients’ emails.
To add some clarification, we’ve included some Wikipedia definitions of the above terminology:
Q4 no longer requires you to white list the IP addresses on your company network/email firewalls to ensure that that employees receive alerts.
Email Spoofing: The creation of email messages with a forged sender address - something which is simple to do because the core protocols do no authentication. Spam and phishing emails typically use such spoofing to mislead the recipient about the origin of the message.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spoofing
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): An email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses in emails (email spoofing), a technique often used in phishing and email spam.
DKIM allows the receiver to check that an email claimed to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain. It achieves this by affixing a digital signature, linked to a domain name, to each outgoing email message. The recipient system can verify this by looking up the sender's public key published in the DNS. A valid signature also guarantees that some parts of the email (possibly including attachments) have not been modified since the signature was affixed. Usually, DKIM signatures are not visible to end-users, and are affixed or verified by the infrastructure rather than the message's authors and recipients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): An email validation system designed to prevent email spam by detecting email spoofing, a common vulnerability, by verifying sender IP addresses. SPF allows administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send mail from a given domain by creating a specific SPF record (or TXT record) in the Domain Name System (DNS). Mail exchangers use the DNS to check that mail from a given domain is being sent by a host sanctioned by that domain's administrators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
Q4 uses Sendgrid as our email deliverability tool. Sendgrid automatically enables DKIM for all emails to improve your email deliverability. In order to simplify setup and maximize deliverability, we are using no-reply@q4inc.com as our default from sending email. Q4 has a pool of IP addresses to further support the deliverability of emails. These IP addresses are constantly monitored to ensure Q4 maintains a good delivery reputation and avoids IP blacklists.