DMARC - A Tectonic Shift In Email

The world of email changed forever when fifteen companies–including Agari, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn and American Greetings–publicly announced DMARC.org. This working group has focused on putting the kibosh on domain phishing and brand hijacking. The new specification describes a scalable method for Email Senders and Receivers to work together to directly check the authenticity of email at the domain level and write policies describing how to treat “bad email."

What does this mean in practice? Well, if you're an email sender you now have a standard way to request raw threat data about your domains from DMARC supporting Mail Receivers. Senders now have the visibility to see phishing threats when they occur and publish real-time policies to mail receivers telling them what to do with malicious messages -- quarantine or reject them completely.

For receivers, this means that they now have a common method for email senders to request insight about their domains and a deterministic method for how to treat malicious messages. If a Facebook phishing attack purporting to be from mail.facebook.com is slamming Yahoo!, Facebook can clearly tell Yahoo! to reject the messages outright. No more heuristics and inaccurate guessing by mail receivers around how to treat the messages. Ambiguity begone!

So you ask, where does Agari fit in to this model? We provide the “big data” platform to process and interpret raw DMARC data, filling a major gap for organizations that want to reap the benefits of DMARC but lack the infrastructure to do so. Email Senders simply sign-up with Agari and they can start processing DMARC data within 24 hours of publishing a record. No hardware, software or infrastructure required. That's Agari in a nutshell.

To kick things off, Agari launched two programs today to help organizations get started with the revolutionary specification -- DMARC for Hackers and DMARC Fast Track.  AGARI’s “DMARC for Hackers” provides all the resources needed for email enthusiasts to experiment and creatively implement the DMARC specification. The “DMARC Fast Track” program is a rapid-fire way for organizations to use the AGARI “big data” platform to process and interpret raw DMARC data. Visit agaridev.wpengine.com/dmarc to learn more about both programs and get started now!