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.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is 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.
The first version of DKIM synthesized and enhanced Yahoo!'s DomainKeys and Cisco's Identified Internet Mail specifications. It was the result of a year-long collaboration among numerous industry players, during 2005, to develop an open-standard e-mail authentication specification. Participants included Alt-N Technologies, AOL, Brandenburg InternetWorking, Cisco, EarthLink, IBM, Microsoft, PGP Corporation, Sendmail, StrongMail Systems, Tumbleweed, VeriSign and Yahoo!. The team produced the initial specification and several implementations. It then submitted the work to the IETF for further enhancement and formal standardization.
(source: Wikipedia)
