Email authentication is an essential tool in combating spoofing and related cyber threats. Email authentication checks are methodologies used to verify an email sender is who they claim to be, and helps prevent phishing, identity theft and related malicious activities.

Authenticating emails gives mailbox providers confidence that messages from your organization are legitimate and not sent by a bad actor, which increases the likelihood that they will reach your subscribers’ inboxes. There are multiple ways to perform an email authenticity check, and the most advanced solutions on the market use a variety of criteria to determine whether data is good or bad.

Email Authenticity Check: Guarantee Trustworthy Communications

The most obvious clues to look for are things like misspelled or overused words, random characters, and non-Latin letters (like the Cyrillic “a” U+0430) that can be very similar to standard Latin letterforms. However, even if an email passes these checks it may still be a scam. Many malicious attacks take advantage of these similarities to disguise their emails as something they are not.

Legitimate companies will usually have consistent, professional-looking templates for their emails. If an email looks amateurish, or the greeting is generic like “Dear Customer” or “Hello User”, that’s another red flag. Some scammers will also change the reply-to field to a suspicious domain, for example, a free email service instead of their own, in order to get you to click on a link that could steal your login details or infect your device with malware.