CASE STUDY: DOMAIN NAME REPUTATION
Email Deliverability, Sender Policy Framework, Message Authentication, DMARC, SPF, DKIM   Return to list of Case Studies
Infracore ensures high email deliverability for sales organization, resolving spoofing and enhancing domain reputation.
A sales-oriented company was facing a significant challenge with their email deliverability. Their sales and marketing teams were sending emails to potential clients, but they started receiving complaints about strange, unsolicited emails appearing to come from their domain. In addition, their genuine emails were increasingly ending up in recipients' spam folders or getting rejected outright.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that the company's domain was being spoofed. Malicious actors were sending emails that appeared to come from the company's domain to various companies, including some of their potential clients. This not only damaged the organization's reputation, but also caused their domain to be blacklisted by several email service providers due to the high volume of spammy emails.

Business Needs and Challenges:

The primary cause of the problem was that the company's domain did not have appropriate Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) records in place. This lack of proper email authentication mechanisms allowed their domain to be easily spoofed. Infracore set out to solve each of these issues. In addition, Infracore managed emerging cybersecurity risks while carrying out each task.

Solution:

To resolve this issue, the company allowed Infracore to implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for their domain.

  1. SPF:They first implemented an SPF record (a type of public record that identifies which mail servers are permitted to send email on behalf of their domain). This allowed incoming e-mail systems to quickly determine if an e-mail - allegedly from the client’s domain - was sent by an authorized server or not, increasing the chance for legitimate mail delivery.
  1. DKIM: Next, they added a DKIM record. DKIM adds a cryptographic digital signature to the headers of an email. This signature acts as a certificate of authenticity for the e-mail that incoming mail systems can independently verify. This additional step is helpful because it addressed a weakness in SPF in which spam messages sent through compromised accounts hosted by the same e-mail provider (and shared with our client) would still pass SPF checks.
  1. DMARC: Finally, they implemented DMARC, an email authentication protocol that uses SPF and DKIM to verify that an email claiming to come from a specific domain indeed comes from that domain and hasn't been modified during transit. They started with a non-enforcing DMARC policy (p=none) to monitor the situation, then gradually moved to a quarantine policy (p=quarantine), and finally to a reject policy (p=reject) once they were sure legitimate emails weren't being blocked.

End Results:

After implementing these records, the sales organization saw a significant improvement in their email deliverability rates. The number of complaints regarding unsolicited emails dropped, and their domain was removed from the blacklists of the email service providers. This not only improved their reputation, but also increased the effectiveness of their sales and marketing efforts. Additionally, the DMARC reports provided them with insight into how emails were being sent from their domain, allowing them to identify and address any further spoofing attempts quickly.

Proper email authentication using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is essential for businesses to protect their domain from being spoofed and ensure high email deliverability. In this case, implementing these records not only resolved a spoofing problem, but also enhanced a domain's reputation and the effectiveness of email-based communications.


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