Email authentication: How to understand DMARC in less than 10 minutes

Email authentication: How to understand DMARC in less than 10 minutes

DMARC is a protocol that allows you to set up a policy for how your domain handles email sent from other domains. If you’re reading a blog about DMARC, you likely have a good understanding on the importance of both SPF and DKIM. If not, read those blogs first and come back here.

In this blog post, we’ll cover what DMARC is and why it’s important to your email strategy. We’ll also go over some of the most common mistakes that companies make when setting up DMARC policies for their domains and how to avoid these mistakes. Email authentication is a little like studying for a test. You can get by with just cramming for the exam, but you’ll be better off if you learn the concepts and then use them to solve more complex problems.

We often see senders implement DMARC without fully understanding what it does, which in turn results in delivery issues.

Those issues can be resolved, but it’s much better to be proactive than reactive with email.

This blog describes what DMARC is, what you need to know before you implement it, and how to maintain your record both short- and long-term.

What is DMARC? Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) is a check on your email authentication (DKIM and SPF). It helps you to ensure that legitimate email goes to the inbox and spoofed email doesn’t.

DMARC is an anti-phishing technology designed to protect brands from impersonation attacks by verifying their identity in emails. If a company has a DMARC record, it means they want to help protect their users from phishing scams. DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, is a technology designed to help prevent spam and phishing. Under this system, senders can instruct email providers to verify that only emails coming from specific servers have the right to use their domain name.

How does it work?

DMARC is a tool for email providers, who receive email on behalf of users, to help prevent spoofing. DMARC records tell the recipient's mail servers how to handle messages that do not pass SPF or DKIM checks.

If your domain uses DMARC to pass, a spammer that attempts to send an email pretending to be from your organization will be unable to fake the email authentication signals that make DMARC work. This allows you to block messages that have these fake signatures, or even stop all messages from the spoofed domain.

Then what happens?

Protecting your business and brand with DMARC is easy. See how to create a DMARC record and what to do next.  Monitor: The early stage where mailbox providers can ensure that the right mail is getting through and being authenticated properly without anything happening to unauthenticated mail.

In nearly all cases, a new sender to DMARC begins here.  Quarantine: Following monitoring, the messages that fail DMARC move to the spam folder.  Reject: In the final stage and what established DMARC users maintain, the messages that fail DMARC aren’t delivered at all.

You can start slowly, putting only a percentage of your emails through the policy. Mailbox providers will report back, helping senders understand what’s failing, what’s not, and the reasons behind it, giving them the intel they need to make the proper corrections and to help with the decision on when to move to the next stage.

To implement DMARC, create a TXT record in your DNS. You will need to choose a domain or subdomain (such as example.com, example.net, or example.org) and create the record on that name.

EmailAuth free DMARC record creation tool creates the necessary configuration for you automatically.