Email Authentication vs Email Verification
Posted by Justin Helmig on Thu, Jan 19, 2012
One customer question that has come up a few times is the difference between Email Authentication and Email Verification.
Both are directly related to email deliverability, but are very different in terms of their role in helping you manage successful email campaigns.
Email Verification determines if a receiving email address is currently valid. This ensures that you are not filtered into spam or bulk folders because you have too many invalid addresses in your email lists.
Email Authentication is how an email server (those run by both consumer email domains like Yahoo and Gmail, as well as corporate domains) determines the identity of the sending server (the server you are using to send your email campaigns). This is critically important to manage email phishing and spoofing attacks, both of which are based on imitating someone else (e.g. your bank or credit card).
If your servers or ESP's do not support the common email authentication methods, your messages may have a higher likelihood of being filtered as spam or junk.
Email authentication involves solutions at both the receiving server and the sending server. This means that if you are sending email campaigns from your own email servers, you should make sure you support the commonly used email authentication methods including SPF, SenderID, and DKIM. Mailchimp has published a table summarizing the email authentication methods used by various consumer ISP's.
If you are using an ESP (Email Service Provider) to send campaigns on your behalf, they will likely support all relevant email authentication methods to ensure successful delivery to all consumer and corporate domains.
If you are interested in learning more about email authentication, ReturnPath has an excellent step by step guide to email authentication.
Although Email Verification and Email Authentication are very different technologies, both are important in ensuring your email campaigns are delivered to the inbox, where they belong.
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