If you don't make it tough for other people to spoof your email, you're not only letting down your customers – who will stop trusting any email from your company – you're putting your brand at costly risk. By adopting DMARC, you can protect your customers against email spoofing, ensure they are getting your brand's legitimate messages, and help them to trust that when a message from your company appears in their inbox, it is a valuable email.
As you adopt DMARC, it's also important to make sure that your third-party marketing vendors, who send emailed marketing pieces such as newsletters to your customers on your behalf, also setup SPF and DKIM.
Importance of email
Email is still an important avenue of communication for businesses to maintain existing customer relationships and develop new ones. Unfortunately, it's also a widespread target for cybercriminals to cause irreparable damage to a brand. Any time a successful technology is adopted, it breeds creativity in criminals. As DMARC becomes more widely adopted, not just by large organisations, but also by small and medium-sized businesses, cybercriminals will look for other areas to exploit.
Are you responsible for ensuring that emails sent on behalf of your company are legitimate, and not coming from a spoofer? Do you have a fiduciary responsibility to customers who are negatively impacted by a spoofer's email appearing to be from your company? Let's assume you are a nation state issuing currency to be used by citizens. Is the government responsible for ensuring the currency cannot be easily counterfeited? If the answer is yes, then the same goes for your corporate email, too.
No company should allow spoofers to diminish customer trust in its brand. By adopting DMARC and implementing email authentication standards you can help thwart the attacks that could be the downfall of your business.
For more information, go to DMARC.org.
- Florian Malecki is International Product Marketing Director, Dell Security
