Almost 90% of email attacks are based on fake sender identities, either of brands (83%) or individuals (6%), according to recent research. Email authentication is an easy method for stopping scammers from impersonating your organization with exact-domain spoofing. DMARC allows you to send a policy statement from the domain owner, which tells email receivers not to accept email from specific domains if they don’t use authentication. This guide explains how to use DMARC and includes resources for getting started and more information about the technology.

Email authenticationEmail authentication is a great way to protect your brand. For domain owners, implementing this security feature is technically difficult. That’s why we anonymize email traffic and pass the data through a network of DNS servers that is shared by all our customers; it makes the tricky part a whole lot easier. The only way to get around this is Email Authentication. If you’re the domain owner and you want to hit that 90% penetration, then implementing email authentication across your entire organization is a must. In this article, I’m going to walk you through exactly how to implement email authentication using SPF, DKIM & DMARC — in an hour! For most people, email authentication means checking the “From” field to make sure the emailed message comes from a legit source.

And given the rise of phishing, malware and other attacks sent via email, making sure that your emails don’t trick recipients into believing they are receiving messages from you (or, more importantly, from somebody else) is crucial. These attacks can be devastating to your business. This why we built Easy domainkeys identified mail authentication — essentially internet-wide® email authentication. It’s also why more than 80% of inboxes worldwide use it to check that an email really does come.

The next time you send an email from your domain, you’ll have peace of mind thanks to DMARC. The centerpiece standard for email sender identity authentication is DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). It effectively stops exact-domain phishing attacks by preventing unauthorized use of a domain in the “From” address of email messages. Grow your business by preventing customer confusion and loss due to fraudulent emails. Ensure your domain is protected from exact-domain phishing attacks by DMARC. DMARC is the new anti-phishing standard for email authentication. This industry-wide effort helps reduce fraudulent emails that impersonate brands or people to convince consumers to share their personal information. The use of DMARC helps prevent phishing and other types of email fraud by:

What makes it so difficult to implement DMARC?

The details of implementing DMARC are not widely understood. It contains some subtleties that many messaging pros are not familiar with. What’s more, it relies on two other standards, SPF and DKIM, which are themselves tricky to implement and error-prone. The specs are tricky and tedious for most companies to implement. DMARC is a collection of standards for improving the security and trustworthiness of e-mail transmission. DMARC’s task is more complex than simply making it harder to spoof e-mail addresses. It actually provides a framework for carrying out messaging policies that are related to sender identity, mailbox management, and message delivery. The Internet standards DMARC, SPF and DKIM are designed to help combat the growing threat of email spoofing, where hackers attempt to make a message appear to come from someone else. To be successfully implemented, these standards require a technical understanding of email that some small and midsize businesses (SMBs) don’t have. And even large companies have run into trouble implementing DMARC.

EmailAuth.io, one of the world’s largest Email Protection Company, has implemented DMARC in p=none mode to help ensure the authenticity of its communications and protect the email users that connect with via its SMTP servers. Although has been using DMARC in this way for several years, it has not enabled enforcement on its domain, nor is it stopping spoofed malicious attack emails which fail the DMARC check from being forwarded by third parties.

A common complaint about DMARC is that the transition to a DMARC compliant policy is difficult. In fact, there are several tools that can be used to analyze email infrastructure and identify issues that must first be addressed prior to transitioning to a DMARC-enforcing policy. This blog post defines these tools, and provides examples of how they have been used.

EmailAuth.io is part of the Infosec Ventures group and our core value lies in taking care of your most valuable digital asset: Email. We thrive to increase your Email Deliverability and help you get the maximum ROI from your mailing campaigns and increase trust amongst your customers, partners and vendors!