Glossary
Email, explained
The terms you meet when you set up a domain or choose a mail provider — what each one does, how to check it yourself, and how Mailotte handles it.
- SPF
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS TXT record listing which servers are allowed to send email for a domain, so a receiving server can reject mail that claims to come from you but was sent from somewhere else.
- DKIM
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a cryptographic signature to each outgoing email, and publishes the matching public key in DNS, so a receiving server can verify that the message came from the domain it claims and was not altered in transit.
- DMARC
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is a DNS policy that tells receiving servers what to do with mail claiming to be from your domain when it fails authentication — deliver it, quarantine it, or reject it — and where to send reports about it.
- MX record
- An MX (Mail Exchanger) record is the DNS entry that tells other mail servers where to deliver email for your domain. Without one pointing at your provider, mail to your address has nowhere to go.
- MTA-STS
- MTA-STS (SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security) lets a domain publish a policy requiring that mail delivered to it travel over an encrypted connection to a correctly certified server, so a network attacker cannot quietly downgrade the connection to plaintext.
- Catch-all address
- A catch-all address receives mail sent to any address at your domain — including addresses that were never created — instead of bouncing it.
- Email alias
- An email alias is an additional address that delivers to your existing inbox, so you can give different addresses to different people or services without creating separate accounts — and switch any one of them off without touching the others.
- IMAP vs POP3
- IMAP and POP3 are the two standard ways a mail app reads your email. IMAP keeps mail on the server and keeps every device in sync; POP3 downloads messages to one device, traditionally deleting them from the server.
Where a term is defined by a standard, the page links to its RFC. Where it says what Mailotte does, that was checked against the product rather than written from general knowledge — see the security page for how the service itself is configured.