What does SPF stand for
Sender Policy Framework
What does SPF help with?
Sender Policy Framework helps with Email Authentication
How does SPF perform its task?
Sender Policy Framework maintains a list of domains from which an email can be sent.
What does DKIM stand for?
Domain Keys Identified Mail
What problem does DKIM help with?
Domain Keys Identified Mail helps with Email authentication
What does DKIM do that SPF doesn’t?
Domain Keys Identified Mail ensures that the message has not been tampered with.
How does DKIM perform its additional task (above what SPF can provide)
Domain Keys Identified Mail adds cryptographic signatures to the email to indicate it has not been tampered with.
What does SMTP stand for?
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
What are MX-records?
A DNS record that specifies which servers are associated with accepting email on behalf of a domain. (Mail eXchange record)
What is an A-record?
A DNS record that maps a domain name to an IPv4 address (Address record)
What is an AAAA-record?
A DNS record that maps a domain name to an IPv6 address (Address record)
How does an email sending server find the address of the email recipient?
The sending server would first request the MX-record for the email address, a DNS server would return the appropriate address (mail.google.com for example) and then the sending server would request the A-record for that server (which would provide the IP address)
What does DMARC stand for?
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.
What does DMARC handle?
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance informs servers of what policies are applied to email messages (SPF and/or DKIM) and what to do if those authentication steps fail.
In DNS, what do underscores indicate?
Underscores in DNS indicate that a subdomain is for technical/protocol use rather than a human-facing service (i.e. _domainkey would indicate a subdomain containing cryptographic keys for authentication protocol)
