What is DMARC and why are my business emails not being delivered?

Some important settings need to be configured to ensure your business emails are delivered. You need to know your DKIM from your DMARC.

Have you been hearing a lot about email authentication lately? Acronyms like DMARC and DKIM have been flying about but unless you are a computer geek, you probably have no idea what it is or why it affects you. With phishing being a major security threat and the main cause of data breaches, it's time to take email authentication seriously and understand what those terms mean.

Email Authentication: The Basics

Let's dive into the world of email authentication and help you understand why it's more important than ever for your business. At its core email authentication boils down to being able to prove that the sender of an email is who they say they are.

If you can verify that an email genuinely comes from who it purports to then that cuts out a lot of (but not all) the risk associated with that email. Let’s look at why.

• The Email Spoofing Problem
  Imagine receiving an email from your bank requesting urgent action. You click the link, enter your details, and…. your information is compromised. This is called email spoofing, where scammers disguise their email addresses to appear as legitimate individuals or organisations. It's surprisingly easy for scammers to imitate an email address but not with the right controls in place.
  
  
• The Solution: Email Authentication
  Email authentication is a technology that verifies that your email is legitimate.
  
  Using information contained in hidden bits of the email (the header if you're interested) it verifies that the server sending the email is the correct one and isn't someone pretending to be your mail server. It will also report back to you if someone attempts an unauthorised use of a company’s domain (i.e. it flags that someone is pretending to be you!).
  
  

Key Protocols: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

Email protocols are the rules that govern how emails are sent, received, and stored. They ensure that emails can travel from one email server to another and eventually reach the recipient's inbox.

Email authentication uses three key protocols: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These settings are recorded against your email domain with your domain registrar (the body that issues your mybusiness.co.uk domain) and are publically available. Email services then check against these records to verify that emails they receive are genuine.

Let's look at these three protocols and what they do.

• SPF - this protocol records the IP addresses authorised to send email for a domain
• DKIM - allows domain owners to digitally “sign” emails
• DMARC - gives instructions to a receiving email server on what to do with the results of an SPF and DKIM check. In other words, if an email fails the checks it can be told to do various things with it:
  
  
  • just let it through
  • to alert the recipient that it's failed
  • to quarantine it for further examination
  • to block it completely.
    
    

Why it matters

Dmarcreport wrote about how both Google and Yahoo have implemented new DMARC policies recently that make email authentication essential for businesses sending emails through Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Many businesses suddenly found that their emails weren’t being delivered to their clients and that is because these key protocols hadn’t been set up. If you manage your own email without using a Managed Service provider then there is a good chance that you won’t know what these protocols are, or that they are needed, let alone how to set them up.

Benefits of Implementing DMARC

Implementing DMARC isn't just about complying with new policies, it offers a range of benefits for your business, including protecting your brand reputation, improving email deliverability, and providing valuable insights.

Next steps...?

It's time to take action and put DMARC in place for your business email.

We're here to help. Contact our Edinburgh based experts today to discuss how we can help you secure your business emails.