Email Spoofing Prevention with DMARC

Unbeknownst to many, email spoofing can be highly detrimental to your business. Essentially, spoofing is the forgery of an email header to trick the message recipient into thinking the message originated from a trustworthy sender. It’s a ploy used in phishing and spam campaigns because individuals are much more likely to open an email they believe to be sent by a legitimate source.

Since your business routinely uses email to communicate with the public, protecting your brand is a top priority. However, with so many advanced hackers and schemes floating around online, preventing spoofing can be a challenge. Thankfully, protocols such as DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) are available to counteract email spoof threats.

By adopting DMARC, you’ll be able to:

• View your company’s outbound email and its performance
• Identify email not sent from your business
• Tell inbox providers such as Gmail to block mail that isn't sent by you (e.g., quarantine, reject)

Protecting your emails from spoofing helps ensure your company remains a trusted sender, which increases your brand’s visibility to the target audience. It also helps protect your customers from encountering phishing messages posing as your business/domain by preventing the message from ever being seen by those customers. Let DMARC and MxToolbox lead your company to maximum email deliverability.

How DMARC Eliminates Email Spoofing

DMARC is a true ally in an email world fraught with fraud and deception. By implementing DMARC, your company’s emails are verified and deliverable, while those not sent by you are met with suspicion and blocked. Regarding spoofing, DMARC offers protective measures against having your message headers hijacked. The more your emails are safeguarded, the more your communications are delivered and viewed.

DMARC is an anti-spoofing protection built in tandem with SPF and DKIM applications. Working together, the three mechanisms form to verify legitimate/trustworthy email and reject untrustworthy messages from reaching the inbox. With DMARC enabled, a sender (like your business) is automatically able to tell an inbox provider how untrustworthy messages should be handled (i.e. the message shows no signs it was actually sent by your business). Through DMARC you can automatically tell message recipients to either: 1) Do nothing, let the untrustworthy message be delivered 2) quarantine (send to spam folder) the message or 3) reject (don’t accept/deliver) the message. With options 2 or 3 enabled you can prevent the recipient from ever seeing a potentially malicious message.

Anti-Phishing + Improved Email Delivery?

In addition to the benefits of preventing phishing attempts on your customers, implementing DMARC can also improve your email delivery to the inbox. This ability is realized through the benefit of reports on all of the email seen "from" your domain

The Solution

By implementing DMARC (in conjunction with SPF and DKIM), email spoofing can be prevented. This best practice protects your outbound electronic communications and makes them more trustworthy, which improves customer confidence in your brand. MxToolbox recommends applying all three helpful mechanisms. For a breakdown of our tools to improve your email deliverability, check out our products page.