Making Sure Your Emails Received as Sent

Imagine the concern when your most valued customer, supplier, or business partner opens an email supposedly from your company, which you did not send. Protecting your brand's integrity and maintaining trust with customers requires robust measures to prevent unauthorised use of your domain. Unauthorised emails:

• Erode customer confidence 
• Pose serious risks to your brand's reputation and security
• Threaten your relationships

To make your email communications to preserve your relationship with your most important stakeholders.

Google, Apple and Yahoo are enforcing these new rules and sending is being rejected. Are we starting down the road to business class services for email, where charges will apply for preferential, secured delivery? A Tier one spam free lower risk email service.

What is the latest timeline?  

In December 2023, Google released an updated timeline and requirements to enforce the email sender requirements. Senders now have some more time to prepare, meet these requirements, and ensure their email doesn’t get blocked.  

Currently, the new timeline is: 

• February 2024: All senders, regardless of volume, must comply with the general email-sending practices outlined in the guidelines.
• February 2024: Bulk email senders must start to implement the enhanced requirements, including email authentication (messages must pass DMARC to be delivered and come from a domain with at least p=none). A percentage of messages that do not meet these requirements will start getting temporary errors.
• April 2024: Google will begin rejecting non-compliant traffic. Rejection will be gradual and will impact non-compliant traffic only. Google strongly recommends senders use the temporary failure enforcement period to make any changes required to become compliant.
• June 2024: The following requirements will begin to go into effect:
  • DMARC record with a minimum policy of none (p=none).
  • One-click unsubscribe in marketing messages
  • Mitigations will not apply when user-reported spam rates exceed 0.3% or if the sender has not met the authentication or one-click unsubscribe requirements.

Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is an email security protocol. DMARC verifies email senders augmenting the Domain Name System (DNS), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) protocols. 

The DMARC standard blocks the threat of domain spoofing, which involves attackers using an organisation’s domain to impersonate its employees. It also supplements Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) the protocol used to send email messages which does not include mechanisms for defining or implementing email authentication.

Email is the most important communication tool for organisations. It is essential to ensure that it's secure and protected against cyber threats. One way to protect your company's email is by implementing email authentication protocols such as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

DMARC is a policy-based email authentication protocol that helps prevent fraudulent emails from being delivered to your customers, partners, suppliers, and employees by allowing email receivers to check that incoming messages are authentic. DMARC builds on SPF and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) protocols to provide a comprehensive solution for email authentication.

SPF is another email authentication protocol that helps protect your company's email domain by allowing you to specify which IP addresses are entitled to send emails on your behalf. Using SPF, you can prevent cybercriminals from spoofing your email domain, ensuring that only permitted senders can send emails from your domain.

Major players in the tech industry like Google, Yahoo, & Apple have implemented DMARC and SPF to protect their email domains. They have taken this step to prevent cyber criminals from spoofing their email domains, which leads to phishing scams, malware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Implementing email authentication protocols such as DMARC and SPF is essential to protect your company's email domain from cyber threats. It's encouraging to see major tech companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Apple taking this step to ensure their email domains are secure. By following their lead, businesses of all sizes can protect their email domains and provide a secure communication channel for their customers, partners, suppliers, and employees.

Employees

Protect employees from email fraud, and stop them from receiving any phishing, spoofing or impersonation scams perpetrated by: Fraudsters who have hijacked your brand name to impersonate fellow employees, executives or them, for criminal gain.

Customers

Stop customers from receiving fraudulent email activity, such as impersonation, phishing and spoofing, that illegitimately uses your brand and employee names for criminal gain.

Suppliers, Logistic Providers

Protect suppliers and partners from being the recipients of fraudulent emails from criminals using your name and from illegitimate emails being sent from your email service partners using your name.

Protect your Brand Name

What's the solution?