DMARC: an authentication framework

A new email industry group was announced this morning. DMARC is a group of industry participants, including large senders, large receivers and relevant intermediaries working on a framework to reduce the harm from phishing.
DMARC is working on a standard to allow senders to publish sending policies and receivers to act on those policies. Currently, senders who want receivers to not deliver unauthenticated email have to negotiate private agreements with the ISPs to make that happen. This is a way to expand the existing programs. Without a published standard, the overhead in managing individual agreements would quickly become prohibitive.
It is an anti-phishing technique built on top of current authentication processes. This is the “next step” in the process and one that most people involved in the authentication process were anticipating and planning for. I’m glad to see so many big players participating.
 

Related Posts

Links Sept 29, 2011

Al Iverson has a post up about his experiences with customers who try to acquire email addresses through appending.
J.D. Falk has a post up about the history of DKIM.

Read More

DKIM is Done

This was posted to the IETF DKIM Working Group mailing list this morning:

Read More

ESPs, Non-portable Reputation and Vendor Lock-in

I’ve seen some mentions recently of ESPs suggesting that if you use your own domain in the From: of mail you send through an ESP then that ESP can’t “do email authentication” properly unless they require you to edit your domains DNS settings. That’s not really so, but there is a kernel of truth in there.
The real situation is, unsurprisingly, a bit more complicated.
What authentication features should you look for in an ESP?

Read More