Securing Your Campaign’s Email Domain with DMARC

Why Should I Secure My Email Domain?

If you’re a campaign or organization that uses email marketing, it is crucial to know how to secure and protect your email domain.

As you know, your organization uses your domain for mass emails for fundraising, connecting with donors, and other outreach. It’s important that the domain you use is protected from impersonating or spoofing by bad actors who might be interested in sending phishing emails or influencing your supporters with emails that look like they come from the campaign. 

Your supporters and voters need to be able to trust that an email that states it’s coming from the “Melody for Congress” campaign is indeed coming from Melody’s campaign. Validating that domain ensures that trust. Equally important, the services whenever you email pass through to get to your supporters will see that your email is legitimate and not tag it as spam..

This can be all done through DMARC, which prevents spoofing, and helps the deliverability of email. 

There are also new Gmail and Yahoo requirements for setting up DMARC, which we’ll talk more about below. 

What Exactly is DMARC Authentication?

The term DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It’s an email security protocol that allows email senders to specify policies for how their email should be sent and received by a server. DMARC has been an industry security standard for email authentication since 2012.

DMARC helps prevent spoofing and phishing, which means that it can protect your voters and email recipients from getting scammed. It also upholds and maintains your brand’s reputation by ensuring all emails it sends out are legitimate, so people know that they can trust you.

With an enforcement DMARC policy, domain owners are signaling that inauthentic email pretending to be from you should be sent to spam  or rejected  entirely—effectively blocking impersonators.

A DMARC record without enforcement is like a bouncer at the front door who checks everyone’s ID—but then lets everyone in regardless of whether they’re on the guest list or not.

In addition to DMARC being a crucial security measure, it will also soon be a requirement for Google, Yahoo, and possibly other email platforms. In order to make Gmail inboxes trusted and safe spaces for recipients, Google will be enforcing a handful of new requirements for these types of senders. Beginning in February, Google and Yahoo will have new, stricter guidelines for compliance with DMARC for anyone sending more than 5,000 emails in any one day. This means any emails sent from a domain- including messages sent on a campaign’s behalf from third-party email service providers like Constant Contact and MailChimp- will not be delivered into inboxes if this requirement is not met. You can find out more about the new DMARC requirements here: https://www.valimail.com/blog/the-new-requirements-for-email-delivery-at-gmail/

Looking for a way to set up DMARC? DDC has partnered with Valimail, a DMARC authentication service, which you can learn more about here: What is Valimail?

Valimail also has an abundance of helpful information on their website, provided below-

A more in depth explanation of DMARC: https://www.valimail.com/blog/what-is-dmarc/

Why is DMARC so important? https://www.valimail.com/blog/what-is-dmarc-enforcement-and-why-is-it-so-important/

DMARC FAQs: https://support.valimail.com/support/solutions/articles/48001234055-dmarc-faqs