What in the World Is DMARC?

What in the World Is DMARC?

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is an email authentication mechanism designed to combat spam, spoofing, and phishing. Essentially, this email validation system was designed to defend your domain from various types of cybercrime.

PayPal developed the DMARC email security standard in 2012 with assistance from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. DMARC instructs recipient mail servers on what to do when they receive mail that seems to be from your organization but fails to meet the authentication standards specified in your DMARC policy record. It's similar to having your own personal security guard for your domain. Pretty amazing, I’d say!

It uses and monitors two other email authentication methods:  

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)

If the authentication (SPF/DKIM) fails, the security policy implemented in DKIM is used.

Benefits of DMARC 

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Email Visibility: Using the DMARC reporting system, you may obtain reports on email messages sent on behalf of your domain from anywhere on the internet. These reports provide you with a detailed look at how your email domains are being used and how you may improve your email communications.

Email Security: DMARC assists you in dealing with security issues like spam, phishing, and spoofing by assisting you in developing a consistent policy for managing email communications that fail authentication. This makes the email system more secure and reliable.

Email Delivery: Even genuine emails can end up in spam folders, which can be problematic if they include sensitive medical information or other critical data.

DMARC gives further assurance that emails sent by a certain firm will be sent to your inbox if they are legitimate.

Monitoring Your Emails with DMARC We can monitor all emails sent from a specific domain thanks to DMARC. If we look at our EmailAuth sending domain, we can see that our primary sending sources are corporate emails (Gsuite), but also Google Calendar invitations.

The easiest and most efficient way to monitor these sources is to use a monitoring tool. You can use EmailAuth for your company to do just that. With our EmailAuth’s cutting-edge solutions, you can monitor all your sources, and see if they are correctly authenticated.

It is very easy to set up email authentication tools like EmailAuth. You can generate a DMARC record easily for your domain using our free tool here. You can also check your record and verify it.

Here’s what a DMARC record looks like: v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:test@google.com; ruf=mailto:test@google.com; fo=1; DMARC Policies The DMARC specification offers domain owners three options for specifying their desired disposition of mail that fails DMARC validation tests. These ‘p=policies’ are as follows:

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p=none. Nothing will happen if a source is not correctly authenticated. It will just allow you to monitor the sending sources. p=quarantine. If the SPF/DKIM authentication is not correct, then the receiving server will place your email in the spam folder. p=reject. If the SPF/DKIM authentication is not correct, then the receiving server will reject your email

How Can EmailAuth Help You with DMARC Deployment?

PHASE 1: MEASURE lets you monitor your domain. Simply add the DNS record provided by EmailAuth and done. No need to add or alter SPF/DKIM records on Day 1. Our dashboard will help you achieve all of that easily.

PHASE 2: ENSURE no one can send email on your behalf except ‘you’. After the ‘Measure’ phase is over, EmailAuth will assist you to reach the p=reject state on DMARC, or BLOCK all emails that are non-genuine.

PHASE 3: MAINTAIN your email security and authentication with EmailAuth, so that you can continue to monitor any abusive activity being performed against your brand, and more importantly, be in the knowledge of who’s attempting what and why! This will help you streamline your business processes to make them more fraud-proof, as it has done for so many EmailAuth customers.

PHASE 4: FEDERATE anonymously to receive information from across your industry. This is a feature supported by most regulators (where applicable) to ensure that Threat Intel is shared universally across the industry. After all, phishers don’t care which brand, they just want money!

And that’s not all! EmailAuth provides timely DMARC aggregate reports and has free SPF, DKIM, DMARC checker tools as well as a DMARC generator tool. Secure your domain right now with the help of EmailAuth.