Did you know that cybercriminals can easily send off emails with your domain?
Once an email lands in your recipient’s inbox, and they open it up, they can unleash all sorts of malware on their computer and environment. This will cause a lot of problems later for them as well as for you.
So what can you do about it?
Enter Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (aka DMARC). DMARC consists of two parts – a verification component and a policy component. To avert the above situation, you would need to deploy the DMARC policy at your end.
SPF and DKIM will help email-receiving servers to determine the authenticity of the mail and how to handle the email thereafter (i.e. allowed the email to pass through, put into a spam or junk folder, or simply rejected it).
In this technical implementation, DMARC has several business benefits which brand and business owners should take note of.
Why DMARC matters
#1 Prevent others from using your domain. It is easy to send off emails with fake domains. This is due to the lack of an authentication mechanism in current mail servers. Cybercriminals are aware of this loophole and taking advantage of it. DMARC blocks out cyber criminals’ attempts to conduct a phishing attack using your domain. Customers and business associates who have come to trust you and your brand may be easily duped into This might result in causing problems for you and your customers or associates later.
#2 Business protection. If a fraudulent email is successful in its mission, the victim company may seek legal redress from your company for compensation. This could hurt your business financially. In some instances, it could even be deadly.
#3 Avoiding the spam inbox. With improved deliverability, the chances of emails landing in an inbox are higher. This is crucial for transactional emails, where you do not wish for your transactional emails to land in a spam/junk folder.
#4 Improved Marketing return-on-investment. If you are running a marketing campaign, you want your emails to reach as many inboxes of your target audience as possible. It doesn’t help your marketing effort with your marketing emails landing in your recipient’s spam box. DMARC will improve the number of emails landing in the inboxes.
#5 Avoid being blacklisted. Internet Service Providers (aka ISPs) and ESPs are setting up blacklists to list down domains and IP addresses that are not behaving. Mass mailing consumes precious bandwidth. This costs ISP as they have to purchase more bandwidth to accommodate more traffic. On the part of ESPs, they themselves do not wish to be penalized by ISPs and placed on a blacklist. Hence, they have their own blacklist to weed out non-compliant customers.
#6 Identify email senders. With a DMARC policy in place, you can identify sources of emails using your domain. In the world of SaaS, some applications have the capability of sending off emails independently; a DMARC would be able to identify them. Likewise for any unauthorized senders, DMARC will also be able to quickly reveal their sending domain. Once you have the information, you can query them on their actions.
#7 Better sender score. If you know what a credit score does and its significance to your credit-worthiness? Then you can quickly appreciate the significance of a sender score and what it means to your email reputation. Internet and email service providers are relying on certain metrics to determine email authenticity – sender score is one of them. A sender score is a number between 0 and 100. The higher the score a domain has, the better would be the preferential treatment by major mailbox providers. You want to have a sender score of more than 70.
From the above, the benefits of deploying a DMARC policy are overwhelming. If you need help with your DMARC deployment, do not hesitate to reach out to us.
