Email authentication isn’t simply about verifying senders; it’s about protecting your organization from phishing, spoofing, and other email-based attacks and, most importantly, ensuring that your email campaigns reach their intended recipients. An email authentication protocol that ticks all of these boxes is DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.
Recently, Microsoft users received data breach notification emails, which, however, were marked as spam by Microsoft’s own security tools.
DMARC helps prevent spoofed emails from bypassing spam filtering, but it’s just one part of a broader anti-spam strategy. Not all DMARC reports are equal; some show detailed recipient responses, while others only indicate success or failure. Understanding why a message failed is as important as knowing if it did.
DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance is one of the most important email authentication protocols that helps protect your email domains from phishing, spoofing, and other email-based cyber threats. Perhaps this is why it has now become a norm for organizations that send bulk emails to comply with.
DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, is an email authentication protocol that protects your domains from being misused by cyber attackers and improves email deliverability to ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients instead of landing in their spam folders.
Businesses are now being mindful of protecting their domains with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, but what about the times when you send emails from your subdomains? As a domain owner or administrator, you create a DMARC record that instructs how email-receiving servers should evaluate incoming emails from your domain to check their legitimacy. This process flows smoothly when domains are included, but it gets a bit complicated with the involvement of subdomains.
DMARC has been saving brands from being victims of phishing and spoofing attacks, and lately, its adoption has been more embraced than ever. After the email authentication requirements announced by Google and Yahoo, all major email service providers are also encouraging the deployment of DMARC.
Is the card payment system of your business secure enough to keep cyber predators at bay? Not as much as you think!
Every email marketer strives towards one thing— ensuring that their emails not only reach their recipients’ inboxes but also engage and convert. This is what we call email deliverability, the measure of how successful an email is at reaching the recipient’s inbox, and it’s a metric that can make or break your email marketing efforts.
How safe are your emails? You might think that your email is just a simple tool for communication, but it’s actually a potential entry point for cybercriminals. With over 3.4 million malicious emails sent daily, which is 1.2% of the total email traffic, the chances of your email being one of them are not very bleak! Now, add to this the vast range of threats ranging from phishing to ransomware and malware, each designed to infiltrate, deceive, and damage to the best of its capabilities.
Did you know that there’s more to DMARC implementation than just the policies that determine what happens to emails that don’t pass authentication checks (SPF and DKIM)? It is the reporting feature of DMARC that sets the tone for the overall effectiveness of your email security strategy. DMARC reports offer comprehensive insights into how emails claiming to come from your domain are being handled by their recipients and the ones that fail DMARC, SPF, or DKIM validation, providing a clear view of both legitimate and fraudulent activities.
DMARC has already gained the attention it deserves, owing to its efficiency in combatting phishing and spoofing attacks. But the journey wasn’t fast and steady from the beginning. It all started when SPF came into play, followed by the amalgamation of Yahoo’s DomainKeys and Cisco’s Identified Internet Mail (IIM). This blog covers the journey of all three email authentication protocols in detail.
Domain owners with multiple subdomains expose their businesses to phishing and spoofing attacks, which underscores the importance of protecting them with DMARC. Generally, domain administrators only deploy SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for the main domains, leaving unsecured subdomains to be the ideal entry points for threat actors. That’s why all your subdomains should have a quarantine or reject policy, with the percentage parameter ideally set to 100.
DMARC failure reports give insights into why emails failed DMARC checks and show where the trouble is to help you fix it. Invalid DMARC records fail to filter out phishing and spoofing emails. So, ensure your SPF and DKIM settings are correct, address alignment issues, and manage subdomains carefully.
DMARC isn’t a new regime; however, regulations and email service providers have now made it mandatory. This exercise is meant to reduce phishing and spoofing by filtering genuine and fraudulent emails. DMARC works in accordance with SPF and DKIM to instruct recipients’ servers to either reject or mark illegitimate emails as spam, reducing the likelihood of victims engaging with such emails and getting manipulated.
Microsoft refrains from rejecting emails that don’t pass the DMARC checks even if the sending domain’s DMARC policy is set to ‘p=reject.’ This is because it is considerate of the legitimate emails that get false positives. So, to avoid disrupting genuine conversations, Microsoft takes a different route.
If you notice outgoing emails going to spam folders of only Outlook recipients and reflecting a ‘000’ reason, then it means your messages failed DMARC with ‘quarantine’ or ‘reject’ effects. You are likely to see the following snippet from the headers of email messages getting dumped in the spam folders-
The rua and ruf tags in a DMARC record allow domain owners to specify email addresses where they want to receive DMARC aggregate and forensic reports. You can choose to receive both types of DMARC reports on the same email address or different ones.
In theory, implementing DMARC is as simple as publishing a DMARC record with your DNS. Well, only if things were this straightforward. As businesses expand and email ecosystems become more complex, it becomes challenging for security teams to prevent email-based attacks and ensure that no legitimate emails are marked as spam.
Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance or DMARC alignment verifies that an email message’s ‘From’ header domain aligns with the authenticated domain used in the DKIM and SPF protocols. There are two DMARC alignment modes: SPF identifier alignment and DKIM identifier alignment.