In last few years spam, phishing mails and cyber attack have increased drastically. Taking the view of rise in attack, 15 companies are planning to announce DMARC.org on Monday. DMARC.org stands for “Domain Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance”. It’s basically a system that offers a common way for companies to authenticate their legitimate email communications with customers and to avoid spammers.
This standard will allow Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo! to offer consistent authorization to their users about the results for their messages from Gmail, Hotmail, and other services. It will definitely improve the reliability of email as many of the users are getting distracted from it due to spam and phishing mails. It will also encourage internet users to have faith and trust on the new mediums.
DMARC is an anti-phishing initiative by Agari and supported by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL. All these companies have joined with Agari to help authenticate platforms operated by Facebook, YouSendIt and other services respectively.
The founding contributor of DMARC includes industry giants and is divided in to three segments- receivers, senders and intermediaries and vendors. Companies and services which comes under these three divisions are AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, LinkedIn, and e-mail security providers Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, and Trusted Domain Project.
“It is the goal of DMARC.org to submit the draft specification to the IETF so that it may begin the process of becoming an official Internet Standard RFC – available to everyone for reference, implementation, and improvement”.
Interestingly, DMARC policies are published on the public Domain Name System (DNS) and are open for everyone.
However, Google has been involved in DMARC from last two years and has seen that 15 percent of the non-spam messages in Gmail are coming from domains which are protected by DMARC.
I feel, taking such an initiative will definitely help companies to reduce the problem of spam and phishing mails. This will, in tun, will increase users’ confidence in email system and also help legitimate email-marketing acts.
