Even in the wake of digitization and the explosion of new technology, such as social media, emails continue to be the centrepiece of digital communications in businesses. Notably, with most people checking their emails first thing in the morning, it’s easy to see why emails are the cornerstone in delivering effective personal and business communication.
Why is an email validation system crucial for business?
In businesses, for example, email marketing is regarded highly as the sharpest tool in marketing techniques. This has seen the usage of emails rise exponentially over the years, as compared to other mediums of online communications. However, with greater usage that has consequently led to large amounts of data transferred across devices, emails pose a bigger threat to email security. This has necessitated the need to come up with solutions and protocols to safeguard email-related communications, as cybercriminals are taking advantage of its popularity to conduct fraudulent attacks and data breaches against unsuspecting individuals and businesses.
In recent times, cybercriminals have become even more sophisticated in their spoofing and phishing attacks. As a result, the need to be more vigilant in protecting against potential damage from evolving threats, including harmful or fraudulent uses of email, has formed the basis for the usage of email authentication standards by businesses. Email authentication ensures that only legitimate emails are received by the intended recipient, reducing the chances of spam, spoofing, and other phishing attacks that can be catastrophic to businesses and their customers.
What is DMARC? How does it work?
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance), built on already established email authentication protocols like SPF and DKIM, is a validation system that allows email spoofing to be detected and prevented. It enables organizations to set a policy for how email receiver systems, such as Gmail, Outlook, among others, should handle emails coming from their domains. It has three settings-monitor, quarantine, and reject, which are used by organizations to give guidance to the receiver on what to do with unauthenticated messages. Its other feature ensures that your company also has control over who is allowed to send emails on its behalf, which reduces significantly the chance of unscrupulous individuals impersonating your company.
Implementing these protocols across your domain and subdomains will ensure that they offer maximum protection against fraudulent emails. When properly effected, email authentication protocols safeguard against brand impersonations and also increase the delivery rate of genuine emails to the recipients’ inboxes. Hence, the chances of your emails being marked as spam are reduced, which is beneficial when running email marketing campaigns.
Conclusively, damages caused by fraudulent emails will not only harm your brand’s reputation, but it will also result in loss of confidence in your brand by consumers and the eventual loss of business. Therefore, implementing these main email security protocols-DMARC, DKIM, and SPF- is one of the best protection for your company against email security breaches.
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