Important reminder, if you own a domain name and don’t use it for sending email.
There is nothing to stop scammers from sending email claiming to be coming from your domain. And the older it gets, the more valuable it is for spoofing. It could eventually damage your domain’s reputation and maybe get it blacklisted, unless you take the steps to notify email servers that any email received claiming to come from your domain should be trashed.
Just add these two TXT records to the DNS for your domain:
TXT v=spf1 -all
TXT v=DMARC1; p=reject;
The first says there is not a single SMTP server on earth authorized to send email on behalf of your domain. The second says that any email that says otherwise should be trashed.
If you do use your domain for sending email, be sure to add 3 records:
SPF record to indicate which SMTP server(s) are allowed to send your email.
DKIM records to add a digital signature to emails, allowing the receiving server to verify the sender and ensure message integrity.
DMARC record that tells the receiving email server how to handle email that fails either check.
You cannot stop scammers from sending email claiming to be from your domain, any more than you can prevent people from using your home address as a return address on a mailed letter. But, you can protect both your domain and intended scam victims by adding appropriate DNS records.
UPDATE: The spf and the dmarc records need to be appropriately named. The spf record should be named “@”, and the dmarc record name should be “_dmarc”.
Here’s what I have for one domain.
One difference that I have is that I’m requesting that email providers email me a weekly aggregated report when they encounter a spoof. gmail and Microsoft send them, but most providers won’t, but since most email goes to Gmail, it’s enlightening when they come.
#cybersecurity #email #DomainSpoofing #EmailSecurity #phishing
@[email protected] would adding those txt records cause any issue to a wildcard redirect I use for myself?
I have xxxxx.com and an auto redirect by my dns provider so that anything sent to [email protected] is forwarded to [email protected] so when I give out the address I can see if it’s been shared.
I like the idea of protecting against unauthorized use but wouldn’t want to lose my throwaway capability.
I find email servers to be akin to dark arts so am at a loss here tbh.
@[email protected] I’m far from an expert, but if your redirect is at the server, and your server adds a “.forward” to the email, and does not alter anything, you should be fine because your SPF and DKIM should pass.
If your redirect is via an email client, or the server doesn’t add a .forward, it may alter the email slightly, but in a way sufficient for DKIM to fail because the hash won’t match any longer. But, I think in this case, if SPF passes, your email client would still accept it since the original DKIM passed before the forwarding.
It gets really complicated. Suggest you try it.
And this is based on my understanding, which, who knows?
@[email protected] ok - I’ll try it on a less critical domain first, thank you.
I run most of my own services from here to avoid any cloud usage but the one thing I do not dare to host is email - I can’t see any refinement in configuration/management has happened since the '70s :-)