On January 30th of 2012, fifteen organizations announced the working group they had formed, and the first version of the protocol they had produced. This was the public kickoff of both DMARC.org and the DMARC protocol. It would grow from just 450 published sending domain policies and 2 billion protected mailboxes after one year, to over 4.4 million published policies and use by mailbox providers and email receivers worldwide after ten years. And currently the IETF DMARC Working Group is in the process of updating the protocol with the goal of making in an Internet Standard.
Continuing Development
With three years of operational feedback from DMARC.org members and others, a revised version of the original DMARC protocol was published by the IETF as RFC7489 in March 2015. The IETF DMARC Working Group, chartered in 2014, became the focus for the development of this and related protocols. This lead to several additional publications: changes to email authentication status in message headers (RFC8601), authentication and internationalized email (RFC8616), conveying authentication results between email operators (ARC, RFC8617), and a new mechanism was proposed for using DMARC with top-level domains (RFC9091). Along the way interoperability issues were documented (RFC7960).
With Gratitude
In honor of the ten year anniversary and the many individuals who helped make DMARC what it is, here is the list of the fifteen original member organizations of DMARC.org:
- Agari
- America Online (AOL)
- American Greetings
- Bank of America
- Cloudmark
- eCert
- Fidelity Investments
- GMail
- Hotmail
- PayPal
- Return Path
- Trusted Domain Project
- Yahoo! Mail
DMARC.org salutes everybody working to improve the security and trustworthiness of email, and looks forward to another ten years of progress.