Salesforce SPF and now DKIM support

Salesforce has published a SPF record for sending emails from Salesforce for years and with the Spring ’15 release, they will provide the option to sign with DKIM.
The SPF record is straight forward, include:_spf.salesforce.com which includes _spf.google.com, _spfblock.salesforce.com, several IP address blocks, mx, and ends with a SoftFail ~all.
Salesforce Knowledge Article Number: 000006347 goes in-depth with information regarding their SPF Record.

With the Spring ’15 Release, Salesforce offers the ability sign outbound emails with DomainKeys (DKIM).

DKIM signing of outbound email is available for Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions.  Salesforce recommends that you add the public key to your DNS before activating DKIM signing.  There is a limit of 1 DKIM key per domain and Salesforce gives you the option to domain match and sign emails for the domain only, subdomain only, or domain and subdomains.  More information about Salesforce DKIM signing can be found within their Spring 15’ Release Notes.
The ability to sign with non-Salesforce DKIM keys means that Salesforce users now have the option to use DMARC. Prior to this change all mail was authenticated as coming from Salesforce, which is perfectly acceptable and how authentication works. The ability to sign with the users’ DKIM key and domain means large Salesforce users are now able to track authentication failures or publish DMARC policy requests.

Related Posts

A brief DMARC primer

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. What DMARC does is allow domain owners to publish policy statements in DNS telling receiver domains what to do with messages that do not authenticate. In addition, DMARC introduces the concept of “domain alignment.” What this means is that the authentication has to be from the same domain (or a sub-domain) as the address in the header-from: line. The idea behind DMARC is that organizational owners can use SPF and DKIM authentication to authenticate their actual domain in the header-from line. This moves authentication from a important but behind the scenes technology out to an end user visible technology.

Read More

Setting up DNS for sending email

Email – and email filtering – makes a lot of use of DNS, and it’s fairly easy to miss something. Here are a few checklists to help:

Read More

Email Authentication in a nutshell

There are 3 types of authentication currently in use for email.

Read More