It’s 2026, and email-based attacks remain one of the major concerns for organizations. It opens the door to sophisticated attacks such as phishing, brand impersonation, and business email compromise. This means cursory checks are no longer enough.
Implementing DMARC setup is a key strategy to prevent email abuse, enhance deliverability, and protect your organization’s reputation. Understanding and deploying DMARC, SPF, and DKIM are essential for securing your domain, reducing authentication gaps, and ensuring compliance with modern email authentication standards used by services like Yahoo, Gmail, and Google.
Out of the three DMARC policies—“p=none”, “p=quarantine”, and “p=reject” each serves a different purpose and provides a different level of security. But when it comes to actively blocking emails that attempt to spoof your domain, the strictest policy, “p=reject,” is the best choice.
Google Workspace helps businesses send emails every day, but keeping those emails safe is just as important as sending them. Gmail now strongly encourages domains to use DMARC, which tells mail servers how to treat suspicious messages. If you set it up correctly, your emails are more likely to reach inboxes and your brand stays protected.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is a crucial email security protocol that prevents email spoofing, phishing attacks, and business email compromise by ensuring that only authorized sources can send email on behalf of a domain. By leveraging SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), DMARC builds on these foundational email authentication methods to provide domain owners with granular control and visibility over their email traffic.
Email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are supposed to stop attackers from pretending to be you and dupe your clients. But what if they target the very system that these protocols depend on?
As email-based cyberattacks become more frequent and severe, authenticating your email-sending domains is now a non-negotiable.
Ensuring robust email security has become a pivotal concern for domain owners and organizations worldwide. Email threats such as phishing, spoofing attacks, and fraud are increasingly sophisticated, making proper email authentication protocols critical. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) stands as a frontline defense mechanism, empowering organizations to protect their domains from email spoofing and improve overall email deliverability.
Your emails are not inherently secure. This means when you send emails to your clients, there’s nothing in the default email protocol that guarantees the message actually came from you or wasn’t manipulated along its way.
When the digital landscape is already flooded with fake and fraudulent emails, proving your legitimacy is essential but also very challenging. While you might be creating an email to send out to your clients, a group of cyberattackers might have already crafted and launched a phishing campaign that looks like it came from your brand.
Sending out email campaigns isn’t just about crafting nice-looking emails; they should also be authenticated and secure. So, whether you are sending these emails directly from your mailbox or using an external email platform like Loops, you need to ensure that the receiving servers trust your emails and that they are delivered securely to the recipient’s inbox.
Not all fraudulent emails redirect you to a different link or ask you to fill in your sensitive information; some even make you download attachments or embedded files that are infected with malware.
DMARC reports are an essential aspect of your email authentication setup. Unlike what most organizations think, DMARC is not a one-time stint that you can implement and forget about. To get the most out of the authentication protocol and properly protect your domain, you must stay on top of things and monitor what’s going on in your domain.
When DKIM is not properly aligned for your domain, your outgoing emails may be at risk of tampering. That means anyone can make unauthorized changes to your email while it’s on the way to the receiver’s inbox, and the recipient might never even know it was altered.
Apart from the fact that most major email service providers and organizations have made DMARC mandatory, many teams enable it without fully understanding what it does or why it matters.
DMARC adoption is on the rise, especially since Google and Yahoo made it mandatory for bulk users. However, it is also true that many domain owners have not figured it out correctly because they don’t follow the best practices associated with it.
La Poste, France’s leading email service provider, which serves millions of users with private email addresses, has introduced mandatory email authentication requirements starting in September 2025. Now, what this means is that every email sent to Laposte.net addresses must pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication checks. If the senders don’t adhere to this, their emails will be relegated directly to spam.
Think of brands like Samsung, eBay, Amazon, and Hulu. These brands are undoubtedly some of the biggest names in their respective industries and have been around for years, which means you can easily trust them with your personal information and data without a second thought.
When it comes to data privacy, the GDPR is clear about its goal: it wants organizations to protect personally identifiable information (PII) at every stage of processing and communication. And as you already know, DMARC is a mailbox gatekeeper that authenticates emails and prevents threat actors from misusing your domain.
DMARC prevents threat actors from impersonating you or someone from your organization and sending spoofed emails on your behalf. However, it’s not easy to set up, manage, and adjust DMARC to ensure this prevention. One of the challenging aspects of DMARC is understanding the syntax and its use case scenarios; otherwise, your DMARC record can run into errors.