Securing Email Communications for a Leading Healthcare Provider
/in Email Deliverability/by ydsrealbytesThe Importance of DMARC
/in Email Deliverability/by Realbytes_AdminDespite the evolution of communication channels, email remains essential for B2C and B2B interactions. From marketing campaigns and customer support to transactional notifications and newsletters, email is crucial for connecting with your audience.
However, your communications program needs DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) and excellent email deliverability to be effective.
As your email volume increases, so does the challenge of ensuring these messages reach your recipients’ inboxes. With the rising tide of spam, promotional content, and phishing attempts, your legitimate business emails risk being ignored, landing in spam, or not being delivered at all.
That’s where DMARC comes in.
Think of DMARC as your email’s passport, verifying its authenticity and ensuring it reaches the inbox. DMARC enhances email security and amplifies your voice in the crowded digital space, ensuring your messages are seen and read.
We will guide you through the relationship between DMARC and email deliverability, providing tools and strategies to secure your emails and improve your delivery rates.
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to reach the intended recipient’s inbox without being blocked or flagged as spam. Factors like sending reputation, opt-ins, engagement, security, trustworthiness, and email content all influence your deliverability.
Imagine sending a letter via traditional mail. You’d want it to reach the recipient’s mailbox. However, if the post office thought you were scamming people or had incorrect addresses, they might not deliver it. In the digital realm, email deliverability ensures your “electronic letter” lands in the primary inbox, not spam or undelivered.
Why Email Deliverability Should Be a Priority
Email deliverability is crucial and becomes more challenging to recover once it goes wrong. Proactive steps to maintain and improve deliverability rates are essential because:
- Brand Reputation: Consistent email deliverability fosters trust. Emails in the spam folder can tarnish your brand’s reputation, making recipients sceptical of your communications.
- ROI on Email Campaigns: Deliverability directly impacts ROI. Emails not reaching inboxes mean missed potential conversions and engagements.
- Effective Communication: Ensure product updates, newsletters, or transactional emails are seen and acted upon.
- Transactional Delivery: Critical transactional emails, like confirmations and password resets, need to avoid the spam folder or being undelivered.
What is DMARC?
DMARC is a powerful email authentication protocol designed to combat email fraud, ensuring your emails are genuine and untampered with during transit.
- Authentication: DMARC works with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). DKIM provides a digital signature to verify an email’s source and integrity, while SPF ensures the email originates from an approved server. DMARC uses these methods to authenticate the email.
- Policy Enforcement: DMARC policies instruct email servers on handling unauthenticated emails, allowing them through, quarantining them (sending to spam), or rejecting them outright.
- Reporting: DMARC’s feedback mechanism provides insights into email authentication results, helping refine your email strategy and improve deliverability.
Does DMARC Improve Email Deliverability?
Yes, DMARC significantly enhances email deliverability, with brands often seeing up to a 10% boost after reaching DMARC enforcement. To understand how, consider these challenges:
- Rising Email Fraud: Phishing and spoofing are rampant, deceiving recipients and damaging the reputation of legitimate brands.
- Stringent ISP Filters: Strict filtering mechanisms by ISPs sometimes flag genuine emails as spam.
- Eroding Trust: The prevalence of email-based threats makes recipients wary, leading to lower open rates and engagement.
- Complex Email Ecosystem: Multiple third-party tools and services complicate consistent deliverability.
DMARC addresses these challenges by ensuring genuine emails from verified domains reach recipients, rebuilding trust, enhancing brand reputation, and making your messages stand out.
How DMARC Improves Your Email Deliverability?
- Boosted Trust with ISPs: DMARC signals ISPs that your emails are genuine, increasing the likelihood of delivery to the primary inbox.
- Protection from Spoofing and Phishing: DMARC prevents unauthorized use of your domain, protecting your brand’s reputation.
- Feedback and Continuous Improvement: DMARC reports help identify and rectify authentication issues, improving email delivery.
- Enhanced Brand Recognition: With DMARC, you can use BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification), displaying your logo next to emails in the inbox
- Reduced False Positives: Genuine emails are less likely to be flagged as spam.
- Improved Engagement Metrics: Higher deliverability leads to better open and click-through rates.
- Global Reach: DMARC provides consistent deliverability across regions and ISPs.
- Future-proofing: DMARC evolves with emerging threats, ensuring your strategy remains robust.
Steps to Implement DMARC for Better Deliverability
Ready to implement DMARC? Here’s how:
Manual Implementation
- Assess Current Email Landscape: Identify all services and tools sending emails on your behalf.
- Set Up SPF and DKIM: Ensure both are correctly set up for your domain
- Create a DMARC Record: Define your DMARC policy in your domain’s DNS settings.
- Start with a Monitoring Policy: Initially set your DMARC policy to “none” to monitor authentication results without affecting deliverability.
- Analyze Reports: Review DMARC reports to understand authentication results.
- Refine and Enforce: Gradually tighten your DMARC policy from “none” to “quarantine” and eventually to “reject.”
- Monitor and Update: Continuously monitor DMARC reports and update your records as needed.
Automated Implementation
Automated solutions simplify DMARC implementation by identifying all services and tools sending emails on your behalf, setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC with ease, providing real-time insights, guiding policy enforcement, and maintaining compliance as your business evolves.
Get Started with DMARC Enforcement
Whether you’re new to DMARC or looking to enforce stricter policies, RealBytes provides the tools and expertise you need. Let us help you ensure your emails reach the inbox and protect your brand’s reputation. Get in touch with RealBytes today and take the first step towards better email deliverability!
Using a DMARC record checker
/in Email Deliverability/by Realbytes_AdminFind out how to validate your DMARC records with the DMARC record checker tool from Mimecast DMARC Analyzer. Once you have your results, reach out to us at Realbytes for expert consultation on optimizing your cybersecurity posture.
Google and Yahoo! DMARC Requirements
/in Email Deliverability/by ydsrealbytesStarting February 2024, Google and Yahoo! will enforce new requirements for senders with over 5,000 daily emails directed to their accounts. These senders must implement an active DMARC policy.
To continue reaching over 5,000 Google and Yahoo! email inboxes daily, senders must set SPF and DKIM records per domain and use ARC authentication for forwarded messages.
Emails failing authentication will be rejected or marked as spam, affecting the delivery of customer communications from organizations not meeting the new rules set by Google and Yahoo!.
Why the Change?
Google and Yahoo! aim to reduce the ability of attackers to exploit bulk senders who do not secure their email systems. By focusing on email validation, they hope to minimize the reach of bad actors to customers’ inboxes and reduce spam.
Additional benefits include improved inbox placement for domains with DMARC in place, making emails less likely to be flagged as spam or rejected outright.
Enforcement Dates
Yahoo! began enforcing these guidelines gradually in February 2024.
Google started a gradual enforcement process in February 2024 with temporary errors and will begin rejecting non-compliant email traffic starting in April 2024. By June 1, 2024, bulk senders must implement one-click unsubscribe in all commercial, promotional messages.
Technical Information About DMARC and DMARC Policies
What Is a DMARC Record?
A Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) record instructs a receiving email server on how to handle a message from your domain if it fails authentication. DMARC works with two authentication methods: SPF and DKIM. SPF specifies which IP addresses can send emails from your domain, while DKIM adds a digital signature to outgoing messages, ensuring they have not been altered en route.
DMARC Policies
A DMARC record specifies a policy for actions if an incoming email fails SPF or DKIM authentication. There are three policy options:
- None: Deliver the message normally.
- Quarantine: Send the message to the recipient’s spam folder or quarantine.
- Reject: Do not deliver the message.
Google Workspace recommends starting with the “none” setting, reviewing reports, and then moving to “quarantine” and finally “reject.” Regardless of the action, you can set the DMARC record to request reports on email server performance and authentication success rates.
Steps to Set Up a Google Workspace DMARC Record
- Configure SPF and DKIM, then wait 48 hours before publishing the DMARC record.
- Create the DMARC record as a text line with tag-value pairs separated by semicolons. Required tags include v (version, must be DMARC1) and p (policy). Optional tags can specify subdomain policies, the percentage of invalid messages to act on, alignment policies for SPF and DKIM, and email addresses for DMARC reports.
- Update the DNS record in your domain host’s management console. Enter the DMARC TXT record name as “dmarc” followed by a period and your domain name. Save the changes and repeat for each domain.
Simplify Your DMARC Setup with RealBytes
Setting up DMARC through Google Workspace can be daunting. Let RealBytes streamline the process for you! Our cloud-based tools make it easy to create and validate DMARC records while providing detailed reports on authentication failures and forensic analyses.