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Implementing DMARC Enforcement- How Can It Protect Your Business?

With PowerDMARC, opt for DMARC enforcement at your organization to secure your business email domains against the malicious intentions of domain abusers and impersonators!

What is DMARC?

What is DMARC? 

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance is one the most widely used and recommended email authentication protocols, that protect organizations against email spoofing attacks, phishing attacks, BEC, and much more. It was created with the objective of securing business email domains from the malicious intentions of cybercriminals. DMARC combines two of the major email authentication standards, namely SPF and DKIM for verifying each email sent from business.com to receiver.com.

What is DMARC Enforcement?

Researchers unveil that most companies stop at the DMARC implementation stage and don’t really proceed to enforcement. This can prove to be a huge blunder! Enforcement is a very crucial part of DMARC, as solely implementing DMARC in your organization is not enough to configure and mitigate fraudulent emails. A key function of DMARC is that it provides domain owners with the ability to enforce a DMARC policy of how they would like receivers to handle emails and messages that fail DMARC authentication.

DMARC enforcement at an organization allows the domain owner to specify how they want to handle an email that fails authentication, unlike SPF and DKIM. If we assign DMARC policy with the “p” parameter, domain owners are presented with three options for configuring unauthorized emails:

  • p=none policy provides zero enforcement and allows unauthorized emails that fail verification to land into the receiver’s inbox without any hindrance. 

  • p=quarantine policy provides lodges emails that fail DMARC authentication into the spam folder of the receiver’s email server, thereby quarantining them. 

  • p=reject policy deletes or discards unauthorized emails that fail authentication before they are delivered at all.

What is DMARC Enforcement?

By setting your DMARC policy to either quarantine or reject, you can enable DMARC Enforcement at your organization.

p=none is essentially considered to be a monitor mode or test mode, providing no enforcement, but instead enables domain owners to troubleshoot authentication settings evading the risk of authorized emails from getting blocked.

 

How Does DKIM Work?

Importance of DMARC Enforcement

With the help of DMARC enforcement, domain owners can direct receivers to put illegitimate and unauthenticated emails to the spam folder or completely reject them into the trash bin. If DMARC enforcement is not implemented effectively in an organization, domain owners will receive reports on the malicious IPs trying to spoof their domain, but they would have to helplessly witness domain abusers and impersonators continue to wreck havoc, without the ability to stop them.

A DMARC record without enforcement is as useless as a security guard who checks visitor IDs but lets everyone in regardless of whether or not they are legitimate.