A Guide To API Security In Email Marketing

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94% of organisations experience high email security risk and fall victim to phishing attacks.

One of the top three methods of phishing attacks is malware or ransomware attachments sent via email. As if there weren’t enough emails facing numerous security threats and potential cyber-attacks, API integration increases the vulnerabilities for such incidents, too.

In this article, we explore API security in email marketing in detail and its importance, benefits, and practices to secure your email and protect data in 2025 and beyond.

In this article, we dive into the role of AI in email API, its use cases in email marketing, and how to integrate AI into email marketing campaigns.

Table of Contents:

The Importance Of API Security

API security simply means the process of safeguarding the APIs from potential cyber attacks and security threats.

Since API connects various systems and applications, it creates vulnerable spaces prone to security risks and cyber-attacks. API integration often overlooks the security measures used by developers or other users during its implementation stage.

This makes API security a necessary practice to protect the application and the user data from various security risks such as unauthorised access, data breaches and other cyber attacks.

What Is Email API Security?

Email API security refers to the measure taken by entities to protect email communication through an API integration or interface. Email marketing API helps businesses protect sensitive information, confidentiality, data privacy and other crucial information that can damage the company’s finances, reputation or operations.

Why is API-Based Email Security Important?

95% of cybersecurity leaders are worried about email security, where:

  • Traditional approaches are failing
  • The use of AI only amplified cyber threats

According to Egress, 79% of account takeover attacks begin with phishing emails.

Here are some critical threats that API email security solutions safeguard against:

  • Post-delivery arming: malicious functionality is released at a URL only when links are delivered to the inbox.
  • Spam: Unsolicited or bulk emails sent into email inbox where explicit consent isn’t obtained.
  • Business Email Compromise (BEC): Attackers posing as high-level executives within the company to trick employees into doing what they want. BEC has cost businesses an average of $5 million per breach, even though they account for only 4% of breaches.
  • Account Takeover: Attackers gain control of an account, posing as the actual owner through a leaked password or simple phishing email.
  • Phishing Attack: When threat actors pose as if they’re from reputed or trusted entities to lure recipients into clicking on suspicious links or divulging them sharing sensitive information.

Benefits Of Email API Security

To begin with, email API security offers all the benefits included in the traditional secure email gateways(SEGs), which are deployed as email is in transit.

SEG provides comprehensive protection against email-based security threats, including:

  • Sandboxing
  • Anti-Phishing
  • CDR (Content Disarm and Reconstruction)
  • Post-Delivery Protection
  • DMARC ( Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance)
  • DLP (Data Loss Prevention)

Then there are other benefits such as:

  • Successful Email API Implementation
  • Ability to Inspect internal emails
  • Protection against BEC and EAC
  • Regulatory compliance
  • Reducing email-based cyber attacks
  • Post-delivery retraction
  • Enhanced sender reputation
  • High deliverability
  • Post-attack response

Also Read: 7 Epic Practises To Boost Your Email Marketing Campaign

How To Make Email API More Secure?

Here are some practices businesses must consider to secure Email API:

Authenticate Your Emails

Email authentication proves that your emails belong to you only and are not forged by an imposter. ISPs prefer to choose an authenticated email for business to prevent security risks such as spam, fraud or phishing.

Here are both authentication protocols by which your emails must be authorized from or through:

  • HTTP Basic Authentication
  • API Key
  • DKIM
  • OAutho 2 Token
  • SPF
  • Basic Access Authentication

Choose A Trusted Email Service Provider

When choosing an email service provider, make sure that they:

  • Support DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS
  • Are GDPR Compliant and Privacy Sheild Certified
  • Have a comprehensive suite of APIs
  • Offer secure, well-distributed and redundant data centres

Our Route Mobile’s own SendClean is an intelligent email delivery platform that ensures compliance with data protection and security measures against all these major security protocol standards.

Ensure Encryption For Email Protection

Encrypting emails will convert all your natural language information into code, making it impossible to intercept during transit.

TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security, is an effective encryption method. It is a security protocol that encrypts data while in transit, helping you send messages securely without risk of privacy breach or interception.

Always consider opting for a service provider that can offer you the ability to send emails with TLS.

Setup DMARC

Compliance-focused organisations must set up DMARC, a unified version of DKIM and SPF, ensuring emails are legitimate and properly authenticated through various security protocols.

Monitor Your Email API

Monitor your email API and remain vigilant about several ongoing procedures, including:

  • Troubleshooting
  • Auditing
  • Logging relevant information on the server
  • Using logs for resources to debug in case of any incidents
  • Keeping track and records of suspicious
  • Monitoring dashboards
  • Tracking API consumptions

Conclusion

The significance of email API security is evident in countless statistics and reports proving how vulnerabilities in email APIs become a precursor to most large-scale cyber attacks.

APIs are vulnerable to exploitation, so it becomes essential for businesses to secure APIs to prioritise the safety of the application and their user data. The best way to ensure this is to collaborate with a reputed business service provider for their email management platform.

We at Route Mobile, a leading cloud communication service provider, offer an advanced and intelligent email delivery platform with a comprehensive suite of tools and feat ures to ensure email API security and other operations, such as marketing and sales campaigns. Contact our experts today to get started.

FAQs

How Does An Email API Security Work?

An email API security utilises the email server’s API to monitor and inspect all the messages sent and received. It detects potential security threats and cyber-attacks through suspicious emails.

What Are Some Common Email Security Threats?

Some common email security threats are phishing attacks, BEC, ransomware, social engineering, post-delivery arming, account takeover and more.

How Does Email API Provide Security?

An API from the Email server provided by the API email security solution provider inspect messages while sending, receiving, during transit and rest, detecting potential security threats and cyber-attacks.

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