Sometime soon your emails will stop arriving at their destination inboxes (Unless you’re working according to the DMARC standard)

If we were to tell you that one day, despite all of the emails that you toiled over, all of the automation you built, that despite all of your email marketing activities, your emails would no longer reach their destinations – your subscribers’ inboxes? What would you do?

So… Allow us first to put your mind at rest. This isn’t happening. With that said, a new standard that is gradually coming into effect in the world of email marketing may put your deliverability at risk if you don’t take action to update your systems and implement it.

DMARC – What the heck is it?

You may have already heard the acronym “DMARC” once or twice, but do you know what it means? If your answer is no, allow us to let you in on a little secret – you’re not alone.

That is, however, what we’re here for, and is precisely the reason that we decided to write this article, that will put everything in order and answer all the questions you’ve wanted to ask but haven’t had the courage to do so (or didn’t know to ask :)).

In layman’s terms, DMARC (formally known as “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email authentication standard aimed at minimizing SPAM. Google introduced the standard when it decided that it was time to improve and update everything having to do with email security, to prevent fraudulent emails from arriving at the inboxes of potential victims, and to provide a significant advantage to those who comply with all of the required authentication standards. DMARC joins the two previous authentication standards: DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), a DNS-based standard that was created for verifying sender identities and email content, and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – a standard that offers a simple method for verifying a sender’s identity.

The DMARC standard relies on the two previous standards and its purpose is to verify that all of their components are in sync. As such, it is impossible to comply with DMARC without first having implemented the SPF and DKIM standards.

The watered-down version is that DMARC is the new sheriff in town, arriving to set things straight and to provide a response to questions such as: What happens if an email fails an authentication? How should sub-domains be treated? And how to decide whether a specific email meets the DKIM or SPF standards?

How does DMARC impact your email marketing activities?

To ensure that you, your information, your reputation, and, of course, your digital assets, are protected to the fullest extent possible, at ActiveTrail we put a heavy emphasis on our cybersecurity and protection mechanisms.

It is for this reason that we also fully support the DMARC standard, which helps to make sure that your legitimate emails safely land in as many inboxes as possible.

What advantages does DMARC offer and why is it so important?

  • Deliverability: You invested time and effort. You thought long and hard about what you’d like to include in your emails. You set up your campaign in the system and sent it out to your subscribers, but your email wasn’t received by any of them because you forgot to define the various authentication standards. A real bummer, no?

At present, when the topics of information security, email fraud, and data breaches top our priorities, many companies block emails that arrive from sources that don’t comply with the                        DMARC standard. As such, implementing DMARC for your domain helps improve the deliverability of emails sent from your domain. And, by the way, if, in the future, you decide it’s time to            improve your domain’s security, you’ll have to implement these authentication standard changes, in any case – such that it’s best to get a head start.

  • Security: DMARC’s primary objective is to detect and prevent spoofing (deceitful emails) and phishing deceptions, such as ploys that attempt to impersonate companies and brands by sending emails supposedly from their domains. In cases where the identity of the sender cannot be validated or if an email is suspected to be SPAM – the email will be blocked/halted in accordance with the domain’s DMARC settings (it should be noted that you can define the settings such that emails that fail the DMARC tests will not be blocked at all).

The bottom line – the DMARC standard lets you prevent emails from being sent in your name from the various email marketing systems, thereby giving you control over who can send                        emails on your behalf, and who can’t.

  • Brand credibility: You receive an email that you’ve been awarded some incredible benefits or that your name has come up as the winner of a lottery, entitling you to a vacation abroad. However, you then take a moment to find who sent you the email and are quick to see that it was sent from a Gmail account and not from the domain of a company you can search for on Google. Seems a little fishy, no? It’s vital that your subscribers feel confident every time they see your brand name, and, in practice, the DMARC standard lets you do just that – by making sure only you can send email from your company’s domains, e.g. Eric@company.com.

Unusual behavior, such as emails sent from Gmail, or other examples we mentioned above, will end up causing a reduction in your business’s sales.

What is the essence of the DMARC update we implemented at ActiveTrail?

We simplified DMARC implementation for you so that everyone may benefit from better security for all of the emails sent out from the system. This means that you, as senders, can now define things such that emails sent out from your ActiveTrail account, but don’t meet DMARC requirements – will not be sent. In other words – by implementing and activating the DMARC standard on your account, you are preventing others from sending out emails in your name. In this way, fraudulent activity and forgeries are prevented.

Want to make sure your account meets the required third-party status?
Please feel free to contact us via email: support@activetrail.net, and we will love to assist 🙂