Feature announcement: Email domain verification using DKIM in Zoho Sign

We are glad to announce the general availability of the email domain verification feature in Zoho Sign. Administrators already have an option in the account settings to send emails from Zoho Sign using their company's email address. This feature was developed to help companies improve the authenticity and credibility of their message with the recipients. However, when a third-party service like Zoho Sign sends out an email on your behalf, there are many times these emails were considered as spoofing, phishing attempts and marked as spam by the recipients' email services. To handle this, companies should instruct mailbox providers on how to validate emails appearing to come from them based on their DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting, and Conformance) policy established against the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standards.

Zoho Sign now leverages the DKIM technology to help administrators verify their domain ownership and ensure emails sent from the product always reaches their recipients' inbox. DKIM is an email authentication method to help companies take responsibility for their message in transit and mailbox providers to check the source of each message using cryptographic techniques. For each email, DKIM will attach a signature during the transmission to verify the authenticity of the message source. The attached signature will be in turn associated with the company's domain name in the background and mailbox providers will verify emails by validating the signature attached to each message. In this way, companies can prevent spammers from sending out emails impersonating like them and also support Zoho Sign to send emails on their behalf without it being marked as spam.

How DKIM works in Zoho Sign?

A public key will be published as a TXT record for your domain's DNS Manager, and every outgoing email from Zoho Sign will have a signature attached to its header, generated using the private key of your domain.
Your recipient's email server will check the email header of each message, with the public key stored in your DNS record every time.
This will help email services to verify your domain ownership.
Emails will land in the spam folder of your recipient's mailbox based on the DMARC policy if this verification failed.

For example, if john@zylker.com is sending a document to mark@zoho.com using Zoho Sign, the email from John will have a signature added to its header (generated using the private key of the domain-zylker) and the public key of the domain - zylker will be already published as a TXT record in the zylker's DNS Manager. Mark's email server will validate the email's legitimacy with John's email header and the public key stored in John's DNS record. If the verification is successful, the email sent by John will land into Mark's inbox.

You can refer to this section of our help documentation to complete the email domain configuration for your Zoho Sign account. For any queries please feel free to write to us at support@zohosign.com or comment in the section below.

Please Note: You would be able to verify your email domain only if you own a custom domain and cannot be done for common email providers like gmail.com or zoho.com.

Happy Zoho Signing!

Regards,

Naveen

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