We all want to keep our brand safe from email impersonation attacks, but the path to gaining compliance can be challenging due to the complications involved in protocol implementation, management, and monitoring. A DMARC advisor is your personal email security expert who has been trained to provide guidance and walk you through your email authentication journey.

A DMARC advisor can be a third-party solution provider, a team of experts, an automated platform, or all three clubbed under the same umbrella.

Define DMARC Advisor

A “DMARC advisor” is a technical expert who, as a member of your company’s in-house IT team, has the responsibility of setting up or updating DMARC settings for your domain. You can also outsource this responsibility to a team of DMARC experts at an affordable rate, to handle your DMARC implementations for you! This can include helping you shift to DMARC enforcement, creating strategies to achieve email compliance, and also providing guidance on how to effectively use DMARC.

The Roles & Responsibilities

A DMARC advisor is as important to a company as a good doctor is to the health of an individual. This is because they are the ones who help you make the most out of your email authentication efforts, diagnose domain threats and exploits and treat those vulnerabilities with advanced email security measures in place.

A DMARC advisor is responsible for the following roles:

helping a company shift from p=none to p=reject for maximum protection against spoofing, without affecting the email deliverability rates
help a company decide which type of email authentication they will use to authenticate incoming emails
helping organizations understand how to properly implement the policies and procedures necessary to protect their domains from phishing attacks.
working with teams across an organization or even multiple organizations who may not be familiar with DMARC or who may not fully understand its importance for their companies’ security posture
ensuring that an organization is abiding by the rules of DMARC (for example, ensuring that messages are sent from domains with DKIM and/or SPF enabled)
serving as a resource for any questions a business might have about how it all works
Guidance in troubleshooting DMARC-related errors

For instance, when you register with PowerDMARC’s advisory service, we will help your business achieve email compliance by building a DMARC policy that best fits your needs.

The DMARC policy is a set of rules that govern the delivery of email from your company, and it is the only way to ensure that all messages sent from your domain are legitimate email messages.

By registering with PowerDMARC, you can get a DMARC policy that allows all messages sent from your domain to pass through the recipient’s filters and deliver them as legitimate emails. In addition, we also provide guidance on improving your company’s DMARC practices by providing free training sessions on how to leverage complicated protocols.

Importance of a DMARC Advisor

The DMARC advisor is a vital asset for any company. The advisor can be the link between your company and the outside world, helping to ensure that your domain is not being used as an anchor point for phishing attacks and other nefarious activity.

If you don’t have a DMARC advisor in place at your company yet, here are some reasons why it’s so important:

1. Enforcing DMARC Implementation with Best Practices

A DMARC advisor is a third-party expert who can help you shift to an enforced DMARC policy of p=reject from p=none.

They have experience with both technical aspects of the implementation process and legal compliance issues. They know how to navigate the many nuances involved in getting a policy implemented, help you manage and monitor your configurations on the cloud, make changes to your DNS easily and provide overall assistance and guidance in gaining compliance

2. Helping You Achieve Email Compliance

Email is the lifeblood of businesses, but without proper governance, it can become a nightmare. The good news is that you can hire a DMARC advisor who will walk you through all the nuts and bolts of your email authentication journey. A DMARC advisor streamlines the following executions — enforcing the implementation of the following things to help achieve email compliance for business communications:

Generating an error-freeDMARC record for your domain
SPF flattening for staying under the 10 DNS lookup limit
Hosting your policy files and records
Parsing your DMARC XML reports
Forensic report PGP encryption
Achieving 100% DMARC compliance on your outgoing emails
Proven reduction in email spam, phishing, and domain spoofing attempts

3. Creating Your DMARC Policies and Exceptions

DMARC supports multiple policies and exceptions to validate an email address against a specific policy. A DMARC advisor can help create policies and exceptions inside the DMARC record that are compliant with your business’s needs.

For example, if your company uses MailChimp for its email marketing campaigns, it may want to create a DMARC exception for MailChimp domains so that emails sent from the company’s domain won’t trigger an SPF check by MailChimp servers.

Also, it’s important to remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to email marketing compliance. The best way forward is often through trial and error—and a DMARC advisor can help guide you through those processes.

4. Providing Guidance on Solving Complex DMARC Errors

When an email address receives a DMARC failure message, for instance, the “554 5.7.5 Permanent Error Evaluating DMARC Policy” error… then it is important to know that this error is not necessarily an indication of a simple mistake. It could be an indication of a more complex problem, such as an incorrect DMARC record or even a misconfigured SPF record that has become corrupted.

An email address that receives this error may have to first contact their domain registrar and ask them to check the DNS records for their domain to make sure that no errors are present. If there are no errors present then there will be no need for further action on behalf of the email address owner unless they choose to manually edit their DMARC record.

A DMARC advisor can help when you receive this error because they will be able to guide how best to solve such problems if they do arise in your case. They can also come up with solutions if you are unable or unwilling to do so yourself, which may mean editing your records or contacting other parties involved in the process like your domain registrar or service provider’s technical support department.

5. Helping You Become a DMARC MSSP

Becoming a DMARC MSSP is a key value addition to your brand and a steady alternate revenue stream. By joining an ever-expanding community of managed security service providers you protect your entire organization while also helping your customers achieve compliance and protect their domains against spoofing and impersonation.

This automatically sets you apart in the market against your competitors and makes you stand out.

Let PowerDMARC be your DMARC Advisor!

DMARC is a powerful tool, but it’s not always a walk in the park. That’s why PowerDMARC is here to help.

Our dedicated team of DMARC advisors will help you identify email security vulnerabilities and take actionable measures to improve the email security posture at your organization.

We’re here to help you take control of your domain’s email security and grow your business! Contact us today to speak to an expert.

About
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Ahona Rudra

Domain & Email Security Expert at PowerDMARC

Ahona is the Marketing Manager at PowerDMARC, with 5+ years of experience in writing about cybersecurity topics, specializing in domain and email security. Ahona holds a post-graduation degree in Journalism and Communications, solidifying her career in the security sector since 2019.

Who is a DMARC Advisor & Why Do You Need One?