I have written extensively about the DMARC email security standard, including publishing a comprehensive guide on how to implement it, with or without additional third party vendors. I also do a little consulting on DMARC deployment best practices. One of those consulting clients uses Proofpoint for their email gateway. They also use Dmarcian, a reasonably priced DMARC report analytics service that also publishes a ton of public content for the good of the community. We were considering moving the client’s DMARC policy from monitor only (p=none) to an enforced state (p=reject) after many hours of steadily improving the SPF and DKIM alignment of their email sources. As I took another look at the aggregate (rua) DMARC data in Dmarcian, I noticed something odd: Dmarcian was getting aggregate reports from all of the expected third party email recipients, like Google, Yahoo, Comcast, and the client’s industry partners, but I didn’t see any reporting from the client’s own Proofpoint gateways.
DMARC
Demystifying DMARC: A guide to preventing email spoofing
DMARC can stop spoofed spam and phishing from reaching you and your customers, protecting your information security and your brand. However, complexity and misconceptions deter many organizations from ever deploying it. Part mythbusting , part implementation guide, this post explains the shortcomings of SPF and DKIM, what DMARC is, how to deploy DMARC properly, and how to respond to DMARC reports – all without the need for an additional vendor, thanks to open source software!
Lessons Learned from the US Federal Government’s Ongoing Deployment of SPF and DMARC
SPF and DMARC are standards that describe how the origins of email messages should be verified, to prevent email spoofing. I spent some free time over the past few weeks creating checkdmarc , a Python 3 module and command-line interface that can validate and troubleshoot SPF and DMARC records across multiple domains, with the intent of building it into a web application that will process DMARC reports. The Department of Homeland Security recently launched an initiative to deploy SPF, DMARC, and other best practices on most federal agency domains by issuing BOD 18-01. This created the perfect case study of common challenges and mistakes when deploying SPF and DMARC across very large organizations, and even a few small ones.
2018-01-30 update: I have made many improvements to my script, corrected a few of my own misconceptions about DMARC I had in this post, and switched to updated results from 2018-01-28.