E-mail is a very convenient way of communicating on the Internet. However, there is one big hurdle: how do you determine whether an e-mail is legitimate or not? Spam filters do their best to stop fraudulent e-mails, but they are not perfect, making e-mail delivery a rather complicated matter.
You can also read: Avoid having your messages being classified as spam
Technologies such as SPF and DKIM have been developed to help spam filters with their assessment process. These create a link between the e-mail and the domain name (from the e-mail address). The only problem is that they have never been used in a consistent way. Until DMARC came along.
For those who want to send a lot of e-mails (for example, for campaigns, newsletters, etc.), DMARC is a useful technology for ensuring that your e-mails are actually delivered.
If you have a mail server with Combell, you can ask our support staff to install DKIM for you.
DMARC is included by default in our e-mail marketing tool Flexmail.
Tip: Each Combell customer is entitled to a free Flexmail account!
This will allow you to send up to 5 e-mail campaigns each month to up to 200 contacts.
Request your free account via the control panel
How does DMARC work?
Instead of a big spam filter aimed at keeping malware and spam away, DMARC uses a reliable method of identifying legitimate e-mails and thus delivering them to the recipients’ inbox.
To evaluate your e-mails, DMARC uses two complementary but independent technologies:
- SPF: Sender Policy Framework
- DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail
Both aim to link an e-mail to a domain name. A kind of identification in the form of Authenticated Identifiers.
DMARC brings these Authenticated Identifiers together in the header of an e-mail so that spam filters can assess them. You can see the result in the ‘Authentication-Results’ (see screenshot below).
Those results must point to the same domain as the ‘From’ field in order for the e-mail to be evaluated positively. This is called Identifier Alignment.
