DMARC for Your Insurance Agency Email: Do You Need It? What Does it Do?
Recently, AutoOwners Insurance has required all the insurance agents who represent the company to have a DMARC record set up for all their insurance agency’s email domains. So what is it, and what are the options?
Let’s start with the benefits of having a DMARC record set up on your email domain. DMARC…
- Reduces email spoofing: DMARC helps to reduce email spoofing by making it more difficult for attackers to send emails that appear to be from a legitimate sender.
- Improves email deliverability: DMARC can improve email deliverability by reducing the number of emails that are marked as spam.
- Increases email security: DMARC can increase email security by making it more difficult for attackers to use email to steal personal information or commit fraud.
Click here to see if your insurance agency email domain is set up for DMARC
Insurance agencies who don’t have DMARC set up and are sending emails through their agency management system or through a service like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact, may have emails blocked if their email isn’t set up correctly at the DNS level. Without a DMARC report or notification the sender would never know their emails weren’t reaching some intended recipients.
Confluency Solutions has an affordable, no fuss solution for insurance agents. We set it up and monitor any email issues for you. You have access to DMARC reporting anytime you want, but as part of the service, we will notify you if your email domain has an issue - you don’t have to worry about checking and deciphering XML based reports to monitor your email.
The service is $14 a month or $120 a year for Confluency Solutions client insurance agencies and $20 a month or $200 a year for non Confluency clients. Confluency does not need to host your email for you to take advantage of the service. Click here to sign up. There is more information about the Confluency Solutions DMARC service at the end of the blog post.
What is DMARC?
DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. It is an email authentication protocol that builds on the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) protocols. DMARC helps to protect against email spoofing, a type of email fraud where attackers send emails that appear to be from a legitimate sender.
How does DMARC work?
DMARC works by comparing the domain name in the email header with the domain name in the DMARC record in the Domain Name System (DNS). If the two domain names match, the email is considered to be aligned. If the two domain names do not match, the email is considered to be misaligned.
The DMARC record also contains a policy, which tells email servers what to do with emails that are misaligned. The most common policy is "quarantine," which means that the email will be delivered to the recipient's spam folder. Another common policy is "reject," which means that the email will be rejected and the recipient will not receive it.
How to implement DMARC
To implement DMARC, you will need to create a DMARC record in the DNS. You can find instructions on how to do this on the DMARC website.
Once you have created a DMARC record, you will need to monitor your DMARC reports. DMARC reports will tell you how many emails are being aligned and misaligned, and they will also tell you which email servers are not complying with your DMARC policy. Some of these may be in XML format which can be difficult to interpret.
DMARC from Confluency Solutions
Confluency will set up DMARC and provide a monitoring dashboard so you can review any of the issues mentioned above. You won’t need to monitor the report, Confluency will do that for you and will send you a notification if emails are not getting through due to DNS settings or a rogue party trying to use your email domain for spam and phishing. We will also provide instructions for how to correct any of these threats.
The service is $12 per month or $120 per year for up to five email domains for Confluency Solutions client insurance agencies (those whose website we host or who subscribe to one of our other digital marketing solutions.
As part of the service we will also advise you as to what kind of maintenance and changes you might need to make to improve email deliverability.
Confluency does not need to host your insurance agency email in order to take advantage of our DMARC solution.
Agencies not currently working with Confluency can have the service for $20 per month or $216 per year.
We are offering the Confluency client pricing to all insurance agents who sign up for the service by June 5. Click here to sign up!