Since its invention nearly five decades ago, email has become one of, if not the most important modes of business communication. Its sheer ubiquity stems from the open-ended nature of the platform, which makes sending and receiving messages quick and easy.

But that open-endedness comes at cost: email is usually the first point of entry for a cybercriminal looking to get access to company data, and it’s also the most common point of failure. As many as 9 out of 10 data loss incidents involve some sort of phishing attack. This can happen when an individual opens an email from the attacker, clicks on a malicious link or provides sensitive information, compromising company security.

In the world of email, deliverability is paramount. When you can’t get your mail out to customers, you’re cutting off communication, which hurts both your business and your brand. So how do you reconcile the two concepts: security and deliverability? With DMARC, that might just be possible.

DMARC is a protocol created to deal with email domain spoofing and unauthenticated mail coming from unverified sources. It’s a standard built on top of existing technology, adding feature that have become an industry standard. There’s three major benefits to DMARC that boost email security and deliverability:

 Reporting:

With DMARC implemented, domain owners receive reports concerning the email they send on the internet. The reports offers a comprehensive overview of all the email being sent through a domain. It gives you an insight on who is receiving the emails, from where the messages come from, what messages are not verified, and what percent of emails are correctly verified. This is crucial information that can help businesses make more informed decisions about what they are doing with email communications.

Control:

Before DMARC, if an email failed authentication, it would either be rejected by the email server or sent to spam. This was automatic, and the domain owner had no control over what happened to the email. But when you deploy DMARC, you get the option of setting your policy to one of three settings: reject, quarantine, and none. Depending on your choice, email that fails validation gets rejected, goes to spam or continues into the inbox. 

Delivery Rate:

When you implement DMARC, you’re showing that you’re committed to preventing email spoofing and phishing. This is reflected with an increase in your reputation as a safe and trustworthy domain. Email receiving servers keep track of this and use it to determine whether or not your email reaches its destinations. By boosting reputation, you’re increasing deliverability, which can only mean good things for your business.

DMARC not only benefits the email receiver, but is crucial to the sender’s domain reputation. For companies that wish to grow and expand their business ventures, they can gain by implementing DMARC. It’s a protocol with two major facets. It blocks spoofing of your domain by unauthorized third parties, but the most valuable facet is that it verifies your valid emails and gives delivery precedence into the recipients’ mailbox. It is more likely that legitimate marketing emails will be consigned into to inbox and not into the Spam or Junk Mail folder. 

Using an application like PowerDMARC, domain owners can easily implement DMARC and secure their domain. We’ll handle the DMARC side of things so you can focus on what’s most important: your business.

DMARC is an effective email validation technology used by companies around the world to protect their email domains from spoofing, phishing and cyber crimes. This system uses existing email authentication tools such as Sender Policy Frameworld (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) along with essential and real time reporting, as an added peace of mind.

Domain owners can publish DMARC records into their DNS records to gain valuable insight into who sent the email from their domain. The information can then be used to get information on the email channel, controlling the emails send on the company's behalf. This builds credibility and trust with customers, while protecting the company's networks and computers.

DMARC has been used since 2012 and was created by Google, Microsoft, PayPal and Yahoo. It was used as email security protocols by security experts, mostly in the finance industry. It then grew exponentially and is now recognized by marketers around the world to improve deliverability and achieve the best in online security.

There are around 3.9 billion email users in the world and this is the channel that cyber criminals love to gain financial gain. Email crime continues to rise by more than ninety percent each year, which is why DMARC is essential to companies, adding value and reducing the risk of cyber attacks, phishing and spoofing.

There is around $500 million scammed every year due to phishing attacks, while one in three companies have already been victimized by CEO fraudulent emails. The worrying statistic is that seventy percent of the emails in the world are malicious, while thirty percent of all phishing emails are opened, even though seventy eight percent of people acknowledge the risks, but open them anyway.

DMARC is able to block malicious emails sent on the company's behalf in order to cause harm. With the system in place companies are able to take control of their emails, while gaining valuable insight into their email channels. The insight can assist in helping the company deploy an enforcement policy to keep them safe. DMARC is able to protect against brand abuse, phishing, scams, Malware, spear phishing, CEO fraud and Ransomware, to name a few.

This effective email authentication system is able to detect and prevent any email spoofing. With advancements in technology, hackers are easily able to bypass original email authentication tools, which included SPF and DKIM. Securing your company email is essential to your long term success and only DMARC, which links SPF and DKIM to achieve the best end results.

DMARC provides detailed reporting providing information on emails published in your DMARC record. You can have Forensic or Aggregate reporting. Aggregate reporting is a detailed overview on email traffic including IP addresses that have used your domain name provided once daily, while forensic reporting is a real time reporting solution which is sent when there is a failure with original message, enabling you to stay on top of your email security at all times.

With most DMARC systems you remain in control and are able to give instructions on what you want to do should an email fail the Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance system. There are three settings you can choose from. The first being monitoring, where reports are sent to chosen email address. This gives information on who is sending the fraudulent emails. Quarantine enables company owners to place failed DMARC checked emails into a spam folder. This is a quarantine period which reduce the risk of spoofing.

The third and final policy is rejection. This provides a detailed report, but the email is rejected rather than stored. This reduces spoofing and all emails of this nature are immediately deleted from the email receiver for added peace of mind.