This is a guest post by Jane Andrew.
Email spying or email phishing has become a head-ache for a multitude of people. Email phishing is basically when someone wants to fool you or trick you into giving them some personal information that might be of their use, and know that there isn’t even the remotest of possibilities that you would have given it out randomly. For this purpose the scammers send fake emails, which look genuine on face value; and this practice has become one of the biggest online threats nowadays.
Domain Spoofing
One of the most commonly used techniques by the above mentioned scammers is ‘domain spoofing’. Via this method the sender makes their email look legitimate when you consider the “From” line, even though it’s actually a fake message – a quite harmful one at that. Email phishing is resulting in astronomical losses – estimated to be worth millions of dollars – for people and companies and hence, tracking down this menace and monitoring the ramifications, has become extremely important for the leading firms and companies in the U.S. especially. Leading the pack is of course Google that has been doing its best to conjure up a solution and save the email industry.
DMARC to the Force
Coming up with the solution of such a tricky problem is no mean task. And hence, many industry groups have come and gone, failing to come up with the desired solution. All the concerned parties have been waiting for the messiah that could protect them from this spying menace; and this is where the arrival of DMARC.org to the fore is being perceived as a new dawn for this particular quest. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is a passionate collection of companies that is eying to halt the email phishing practices among other wicked activities via mail.
Standard Protocol
DMARC is vowing to carry forward the efforts made by mail authentication standards in the past like SPF and DKIM, and keep a track of domain spoofing and other means of tracking down data by the creation of a standard protocol. This protocol would make sure the authenticity of emails by measuring the authenticity level. DMARC will help massive email senders make sure that their emails are recognized by mail providers as legitimate, and define policies to ward off messages that are spoofs from various senders who have spying intentions.
Following the Trailblazers
What DMARC’s initiative has done is that the Who’s Who of mail senders and providers like Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal et al, are now using the DMARC specifications. When the trailblazers follow a particular specification, you know that most of the rest are inevitably going to follow suit sooner rather than later. According to latest stats, up to 15% of Gmail’s non-spam messages are filtered through domains that are protected by DMARC. This means that Gmail users can rest assured that they won’t be receiving spoof messages from these particular senders. And when a particular phishing counter system begins to work smoothly, the menace begins to evaporate gradually – this is exactly what DMARC is vying to achieve, and doing a commendable job for the purpose as well.
Authenticating Outbound Mail
All large email senders can get more detail from the DMARC website. Further use of DMARC can help us all reduce the practice of scammers, who are regularly trying to come up with different tricks to spy into your personal detail through your emails. Authenticating your outbound mail is the way forward; there are no two ways about that.
Author Bio
Jane Andrew is the author of cell phone spy and cell phone tracking technology. She provides tips, tricks and news about mobile phone monitoring apps. You can also follow her on Twitter @janeandrew01 to get the latest tips about cell phone technology.
Image credit: Image is provided by the author of this post.
