Domain Keys Identified Mail
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a method for associating a domain name to an email message, thereby allowing a person, role, or organization to claim some responsibility for the message. The association is set up by means of a digital signature which can be validated by recipients. Responsibility is claimed by a signer —independently of the message's actual authors or recipients— by adding a DKIM-Signature: field to the message's header. The verifier recovers the signer's public key using the DNS, and then verifies that the signature matches the actual message's content.
A DKIM signature can cover other fields of a message's header, such as the From: and Subject: fields, and the message body (or its initial part). The DKIM-Signature field itself is always implicitly covered, and, besides the signature proper, contains other data identified by tags, such as the domain name, the list of covered fields, the signing algorithm, and the method by which text snippets are simplified for signing purposes (canonicalization). Thus, the strength of a DKIM-Signature can be tuned so as to allow those message modifications that are considered "normal". Note that DKIM is not designed to provide end-to-end integrity.
Prominent email service providers implementing DKIM include Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL. Any mail from these organizations should carry a DKIM signature.
DKIM, as stated on the DKIM homepage, is the result of merging DomainKeys and Identified Internet Mail. This merged specification has been the basis for a series of IETF standards-track specifications and support documents.
Read more about Domain Keys Identified Mail: Overview, Advantages, Weaknesses
Famous quotes containing the words domain, keys, identified and/or mail:
“No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Bless all useful objects,
the spoons made of bone,
the mattress I cook my dreams upon,
the typewriter that is my church
with an altar of keys always waiting.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)