How to Improve Email Deliverability with DMARC?

What is DMARC?

DMARC is a standardized email authentication and reporting protocol that ensures the authentication of sender domains by ISPs and allows actions to be taken if unauthorized usage is detected to defend against cyberattacks.

While SPF and DKIM are important email authentication standards, they only provide partial solutions and need to be used with DMARC authentication. DMARC leverages SPF and DKIM to provide additional protection to your email infrastructure, safeguarding it against phishing attempts.

What are the benefits of DMARC?

1. Protecting your sending reputation: DMARC safeguards your brand by preventing unauthorized senders from sending emails from your domain. Publishing DMARC records under SmartPush's authentication can positively enhance your reputation.
2. Improving email deliverability: DMARC reports increase the visibility of the email delivery process in terms of who initiates the email from your domain.
3. Ensuring future email deliverability: DMARC helps establish consistent policies within the email community for handling emails that fail authentication. This contributes to a more secure and trustworthy email ecosystem, keeping you away from spam rejection lists.
4. Supporting displaying your logo with BIMI authentication: DMARC enables you to send messages that conform to the BIMI specification. This heightens your brand awareness and visually appeals to supported email clients.

How does DMARC work?

DMARC operates at the top level of email security protocols, but it cannot exist independently. Prior to implementing DMARC, you need to deploy the two primary authentication protocols, SPF and DKIM, which employ different methods to verify if an email is from a legitimate source.

The DMARC authentication protocol has three main purposes:

1. Verify if DKIM and SPF authentication are valid.
2. Specify how ISPs handle emails that fail authentication checks.
3. Allow ISPs to send reports to senders regarding the results of passing or failing DMARC authentication checks.

Therefore, an email authenticated by DMARC will invariably pass DKIM and SPF as well.

DMARC has three main policies:

1. P=none: This is also known as the monitoring mode policy, which means that regardless of whether the email passes DMARC authentication or not, ISP does not take any action and will deliver it to the recipient. 
2. P=quarantine: This policy sends emails that fail DMARC authentication to the spam folder or quarantine folder.
3. P=reject: The reject mode policy is the most secure policy that blocks emails that fail DMARC authentication and sends them back. 

How SmartPush helps you implement DMARC?

After creating a SmartPush account, you can choose to send emails using the SmartPush default domain or opt for a custom brand domain. SmartPush will automatically complete identity authentication whether it be a default domain or a custom domain.

Default Domain

Upon successful account registration, you can directly select the default domain for sending emails. The default domains of SmartPush are sender domains that have completed SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication.

Custom Domain

SmartPush will help you automatically generate TXT records of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for custom domain authentication. If you upload the brand logo when authenticating the domain, it will also automatically generate TXT records of BIMI for you. Your domain administrator can easily publish the TXT entries to the DNS records of your domain to complete the authentication.

Note: If you haven’t uploaded the brand logo, we will only add SPF and DKIM email authentication, with a "P=none" DMARC policy. If you have uploaded the brand logo, we will help you add SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI authentication with the "P=quarantine" or "P=reject" DMARC policy.

You can view the authentication status of all custom domain names by going to [Settings] > [Domain Management] on SmartPush.