DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is now one of the three required pillars of email security, along with SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) verification. SPF and DKIM are automatically implemented in folk when you authenticate your email domain, but DMARC is a manual action that can be done in a few quick steps.
What is DMARC?
DMARC is an email validation system designed to protect a company's email domain from being used for email spoofing and phishing scams. Implementing DMARC is crucial to securing email communication and protecting your brand from phishing and spoofing attacks.
Benefits of DMARC
Enhanced Email Security and Brand Protection: DMARC helps protect your domain from email spoofing, phishing, and other malicious activities by verifying the sender’s authenticity. This reduces the risk of your domain being used for fraudulent purposes by bad actors, preserving your brand reputation.
Improved Deliverability: By implementing DMARC, your emails are more likely to be trusted by receiving servers, reducing the chances of your legitimate emails being marked as spam or rejected outright.
Visibility and Reporting: DMARC provides regular reports that show who is sending emails on behalf of your domain. This allows you to monitor legitimate and unauthorized use of your domain.
Policy Enforcement: With DMARC, you can specify a policy for handling emails that fail authentication checks. You can start by monitoring the traffic, then move to quarantine, and eventually reject unauthenticated emails.
Adding DMARC
We recommend verifying your domain in folk before proceeding to the DMARC configuration. After that, you must add a new record to the DNS Table on your domain host's settings page.
What is a DNS Table?
A DNS table is a database that enables the translation of human-friendly domain names into the numerical IP addresses used by computers to access websites. You need to add a new record to a DNS table for DMARC to help receiving mail servers determine whether an email claiming to come from your domain is legitimate and instruct them on handling emails that fail authentication checks.
What DNS settings should I use for DMARC?
When adding a new DNS record, use the following settings:
For the Type, select
TXTFor the Hostname, add
_dmarc.&your custom domain name. For example, folk’s isfolk.app, so the hostname is_dmarc.folk.appFor the Values, the minimum and recommended entries for DMARC are:
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; pct=100v=DMARC1 specifies the DMARC Protocol Version to use
p=quarantine is the domain's protocol, and it specifies how the receiving server should treat emails that fail SPF and/or DKIM authentication. Several options can be selected, but we recommend to use quarantine.
The options are:
'none': Do nothing, just collect and report data
'quarantine': Move unauthenticated emails to the spam or junk folder
'reject': Reject unauthenticated emails outright
pct=100 is an optional tag, but we recommend using it as it determines the percentage of your domain's email traffic to which the DMARC policy should be applied.
To make it easy for you, your personal DMARC configuration information can be found in your folk account. To find this, navigate to the Settings page > Senders and select 'reverify domain' on the top three dots beside your verified domain. Your DMARC details can be found at the bottom of that page underneath where you've authenticated your domain.
Here is an example of how folk's DMARC DNS record looks with the domain 'folk-email.com'.
The above values are only the minimum DMARC settings you can use. If you'd like to specify further how DMARC works for your domain, you can use this tool to help generate the settings for the DNS record.
💡 Please note: after setting up DMARC, you'll likely need to wait 48 hours before the DMARC configuration is complete. You can use this tool or check your folk account to see if it's verified (details below on successful verification).
DMARC successfully verified
When your DMARC is successfully set up, it will appear as 'Valid' in green, as per the screenshot below.
Considerations
Each domain can have only 1 DMARC record, so if you already see a DMARC entry in your DNS table, you can either leave it as it is or amend it to reflect the value we suggest. In case you keep the existing value, it will show 'invalid' in folk, but your DMARC configuration will still be valid.
💬 Do you have any questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you! You can find the folk team via:
Live chat from your account (the ? button in the bottom right-hand corner)
Or send us an email