How Safe is Your Domain? Email Security Compliance

Email Security is Critical for Business

When you ask a business owner about email security, their first concern is generally about protecting the organisation itself against viruses, trojans and ransomware from external sources. Phishing and email hacking attempts are the primary focus of cybersecurity layers, with scanning at the periphery of the organisation.

However, little thought is given to the fact that many external avenues of attack may impersonate internal senders. Spoofing, as this is known, doesn't just affect your business, it can also be used to target your suppliers, customers, your staff and other stakeholders.

Email Impersonation is a Big Problem

"Your client receives an email from you, that you didn't send."

Email impersonation and spoofing are common methods used to fool users into responding to harmful email requests. Unauthenticated emails, appearing to come from your own domain, have the potential to damage trust in your business, its reputation, create liability and cause considerable financial harm. It is for this reason that Google, Yahoo and many other industry giants insist on email authentication for incoming emails. You may have noticed that Gmail is bouncing your emails.

You need to ask yourself: 

• Who is sending phishing email purporting to be from your domain
• What is the reputation of your domains and delegated IPs
• Where other senders are and What their reputations are
• How your SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup is performing
• What on-going maintenance you need to monitor and improve your email deliverability

DMARC Solution with ITM and Sendmarc

Fortunately there is a way to combat this kind of spam by enhancing your email security at the domain level by improving your existing email hosting solution. so that you can play your part in improving email security and deliverability for everyone. The DMARC system, as it is known, uses two other well know protocols, SPF and DKIM to identify legitimate senders of email.

Email Authentication

By implementing email authentication, you not only protect your own business, but help curb spam on the internet as a whole. This has many benefits for your business:

Email Deliverability: Email security DMARC compliance dramatically improves email deliverability for the business, especially for marketing emails and  system messaging.
Eradicates Email Impersonation & Spoofing: This means your employees, customers and suppliers can be sure that emails from your business are authentic.
Improve Domain & Email Reputation: Your email server reputation increases an you will avoid being placed on spam blocklists.
Proactive Monitoring: The process of securing your email involves recording, tracking and reporting of your email so that only illegitimate mails are denied delivery.

Email Reputation 

Our solution ensures that your most important business communication tool will be the safest guardian of your reputation; email will arrive where you want it to, and your name is protected from fraudulent use through proactive monitoring of your email ecosystem. We set your domain up to identify real emails and stop fake ones, so you can be fully confident that any email bearing your name is authentic. 

Email Deliverability and Email Marketing

Setting up and managing your DMARC configuration is the key to getting insight into your email delivery. For marketing personnel, email deliverability is hampered by email being rejected, quarantined or being sent to junk email spam folders. This reduces the effectiveness of your bulk email marketing campaigns and newsletters.

Uncompliant (unauthenticated) email does not have a high deliverability rate and also harms your sending email server reputation, resulting in a spam blacklist server listings.

Email Security

Security is a ongoing activity and needs to be maintained and monitored. Our process works as follows:

1. Publishing DMARC records - Our first steop is adding DMARC records to the DNS, and then publishing these. This ensures that every time an email service received a mail using your name, a report is sent to Sendmarc, allowing us to see who is using your domain - whether legitimate or not.
2. Configuring DNS (Domain Name System) - We then migrate the management of SPF and DKIM to the Sendmarc platform - ensuring that these critical authentication mechanisms are properly managed and enabling the best email deliverability possible for legitimate senders.
3. Analysing Reporting - Now that we've enabled reporting, and we're able to make changes to the relevant configurations, it's time to analyse the data. This gives us insight into how your email name is being used - both legitimately and illegitimately. This intelligence lets us identify your risk and exposure to email fraud so we can put in place the necessary measures to stop the abuse of your name by criminals as well as eliminate to associated financial, operational and reputational risks.
4. Fortifying Your Email Security - To implement and activate DMARC we configure all approved services sending email using your name. This ensures the DMARC policy is applied across your entire email environment, including all third parties that send email on your behalf, and that only legitimate emails reach an inbox and the best email deliverability rates are achieved.
5. Achieve a State of Full Protection - The correct configuration of your entire email environment, reaching a state where all illegitimate emails are stopped from reaching an inbox, and that only legitimate emails are delivered is guaranteed within 90 days.
6. Actively Defending and Protecting your Environment - The continually increasing volume of fraudulent email activities combined with the growing adoption of cloud services for email means that DMARC cannot be a one-time-configuration project, but rather requires the ongoing monitoring and updating of the email environment to achieve the highest and safest state of email coompliance and deliverability.
7. Implementing Email Branding and Privacy Controls - TLS-RPT and MTA-STS are key controls to ensure encryption of emails, ensuring the privacy of those mails, while BIMI allows you to get your branding into the customers email client. Once your domain is properly protected against email impersonation, we can ensure that these standards are implemented.

For one, this process ensures alignment across the different authentication methods; DMARC, SPF and DKIM – this means that the recipient can have trust that the email comes from a legitimate sender and not a spoofed or fraudulent one. Alignment also helps prevent domain-based phishing attacks, where attackers use a similar-looking domain to trick recipients into opening malicious emails.

How Safe is Your Domain?

Find out how you stack up on email compliance and authentication.