DMARC. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance

DMARC is the first and only email authentication technology that can make the From address that users see in their email clients trustworthy.

DMARC is a relatively new advance in email authentication. It was created in 2011 and has since been adopted by senders and mailbox providers alike to prevent phishing and spoofing. Return Path was a founding contributor of the DMARC framework and we’re proud to have been involved from the very beginning.

Having a DMARC record for your email marketing efforts ensures that legitimate email is properly authenticating against established set standards and that fraudulent activity appearing to come from domains under the organization’s control (your active sending domains, non-sending domains, and defensively registered domains) is blocked. Two key values of DMARC are domain alignment and reporting.

The alignment feature prevents spoofing of the “header from” address by:

  1. Matching the “header from” domain name with the “envelope from” domain name used during an SPF check, and
  2. Matching the “header from” domain name with the “d= domain name” in the DKIM signature.