One of the largest problems facing individuals on all email services is that the "From" line can be easily forged (spoofed). When Internet mail was first designed there was no intrinsic authenticity built into messages, and as time has passed organized crime and marketers have taken advantage of that for a wide variety of spamming and phishing schemes.

DMARC is an email authentication protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing and phishing It is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing. The purpose and primary outcome of implementing DMARC is to protect a domain from being used in business email compromise attacks, phishing email and email scams.

Each message coming into TechMail is checked using DMARC, which includes checking DKIM and SPF, and the results can affect email delivery or quarantining of messages. The DMARC checks may be incorporated into the intelligent message filtering score known as spam confidence level (SCL). The result is an incremental improvement in handling messages with spoofed addresses and an increase in assurance that the message came from the alleged sender.

As a TechMail customer, please be aware of the following important information:

• If you use your TechMail address from commercial websites to send yourself an email message, then it may be categorized as spam. Occasionally, we see something that we would like to forward as an email, such as a news story. If the website is asking for a "From" email address, use one of your other email addresses instead of your TechMail address.
• Internal messages between TechMail users are never categorized as spam by the system.
• It is not necessary to place TechMail addresses (@ttu.edu) in your safe senders or safe recipients lists.
• You may need to check for quarantined messages by watching for alerts emailed to your TechMail account or by visiting the Quarantine app online.

The DMARC feature reduces the amount of junk email that you receive and increases the likelihood that the message came from the alleged sender. It also results in less spoofing of your TechMail address by unauthorized users.