We have strategically located our data centers and colocated with the best providers to maximize our Anycast network. We’ve iterated over and over again to eek out the best in software, systems and infrastructure. We’ve leveraged the power of DNS to give give customers fast and reliable monitoring, effective failover and load balancing and at each step, we’re always paying attention to the effects on latency. And it’s all paid off: we’re fast.

From one globally distributed company to another, “Sometimes speed alone isn’t enough.” With the likes of Traffic Management and Real Time Traffic Management, we’ve already given our customers more control to distribute their traffic regionally and to do it quickly, but what if the structure of the internet doesn’t fit the business’ model, networking limitations, content needs or distribution model?

Here’s five reasons why Geo Traffic Management (GeoTM) is the answer.

Network Tuning

Since its inception, Dyn has leveraged the benefits of a natural Anycast drag to regionalize traffic for our customers. Now imagine a small European ISP that is sitting on the West Coast. This company has picked some bandwidth providers that work great at providing internet for their customers but are now favoring some paths that end up in the U.S. GeoTM allows customers to correct for these anomalies by specifying the affected countries and supplementing the normal Traffic Manager behavior.

Australia might not be in Asia

The growth of both the Asian and Oceania markets has made the necessity for traffic in countries such as China and Australia to be more targeted than just the Eastern hemisphere. Added to this is a regional propensity for traffic to favor going to the U.S. or Europe when it needs to ask a question, not to mention the costs associated with traffic being pulled halfway around the world.

Cloud Balancing

The cost of bandwidth and the deliverability of content can come into play for customers who are relying on the cloud to host and serve traffic. These cloud services provide a simple CNAME to point to the nodes that come and go. When this spans multiple regions and some of those regions pay a premium for bandwidth, then it’s time to be creative. CDNs can be price shopped per country to weigh the benefits of regional or global distribution networks. Content can be balanced between cloud regions to help keep traffic where it’ll get the best response.

Content Distribution

With over 22 Spanish speaking countries in the world, geographically distributed traffic isn’t always the best or easiest choice for a content architecture. GeoTM allows customers to create their own regions for their own needs. Language, politics and personal grudges are now available to the customer when deciding where their traffic should go.

The Facts

But really, what does GeoTM do?

• Customized responses based on country of originating DNS resolver
• State and province support for U.S. and Canada
• Large set of supported record types including A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, SPF, SRV, SSHFP and DHCID
• An option for a default or fallback region for queries which do not match any configured GeoTM rules
• Ability to overlay traditional Active Failover or Traffic Management to add granularity
• Full API support (REST and SOAP)

When engineering excellence is the name of the game, it’s important to go above and beyond with extra functionality. Fundamentally, GeoTM gives the ability to set a response based on the geography of the requesting party. Pairing the capabilities of GeoTM with our other advanced feature set allows our customers to tune their DNS to what works better for them. DynECT Managed DNS allows customers this control without sacrificing the performance that Dyn’s worked so hard for.

Thanks to the private beta we launched in late 2011, we’ve had the opportunity to flex much of this technology on our infrastructure. It has given us some great insight into how customers can leverage it for their business and maintain our two states of being, fast and faster.

Moderated by abi CEO Jamie Coughlin, who pressed the founders to reveal all their juiciest details, the nearly 100 people in attendance peeked behind the curtain and saw what it takes to transform an idea into a thriving business.

Here’s some information about the panel, how they got their growing businesses off the ground and why Dyn loves being so involved.

Eric Hansen, CEO/Founder of Sitespect (Boston, MA)

• Previously founded Worldmachine Technologies
• Spent eight months using free wi-fi in the Boston Public Library
• Met partner at pizza e-Dinner
• Was glad he didn’t do market analysis and just jumped right in

Karl Wirth, CEO/Founder of Apptegic (Somerville, MA)

• Has four children and waited until youngest was no longer a baby so he could nurture his start-up baby
• Was rejected by tons of VCs before lining up angel investors
• First idea didn’t percolate so they threw away most of their code and customers and started over

Gerard Murphy – CEO/Co-Founder, Mosaic Storage Systems (Nashua, NH)

• Met co-founder on the bus on the first day of seventh grade
• Hatched idea for Mosaic over beer and darts
• Put up website and had five sales in first month but couldn’t even take clients’ credit cards

Medhi Daoudi, CEO/Co-Founder, Catchpoint (NYC/LA)

• Left Google and a seven figure paycheck to start his company. Has check framed in his office
• Heard no’s from 50 VCs, so instead fundraised from his family. Mother-in-law always asks about business
• Company is bi-coastal in New York and Los Angeles

Travis Warren, CEO/Co-Founder, Whipplehill (Bedford, NH)

• Started at Carnegie Mellon solely so he could be hired by Apple
• Mentored by father’s business partner before and after the work day
• Was working on business plan but was also creating websites for private schools. Scrapped the business plan because he already had a business

“Dyn is committed to working with the abi to become the cultivator, aggregator and voice of the startup/entrepreneurial/innovation ecosystem north of Boston,” said Kyle York, Dyn Chief Revenue Officer and President of the abi board. “With these two great organizations working together, the sky really is the limit.”

For more information on the abi, visit their website and follow them on Twitter.

Such a simple sentence, yet the meaning or reason why someone didn’t get it can vary wildly. We use email today for everything from delivering invoices, confirmation of online account creation, medical prescriptions that are ready to pick up at the pharmacy, alternatives to traditional mail and even connections to people in your social media network.

So let’s look into what the reasons might be, how we improved our internal processes with our invoicing practices and how we ate our own cooking in using DynECT Email Delivery in improving all of it.

There are many reasons why someone may not get your email, ranging from:

• Message being flagged as SPAM
• Destination email server is down
• Destination user’s email box is at quota
• Destination user’s email address doesn’t exist (as they no longer work there or the address changed)
• Your company’s SMTP server’s IP address has been blacklisted

Our Customers Weren’t Getting Our Invoices

As our customers know, Dyn sends all invoices via email, done partially to control postage costs and because we aim to be environmentally conscious and don’t want to needlessly kill trees. However, relying solely on email as a delivery mechanism has its challenges. We noticed that we could go months without successfully reaching someone regarding billing inquiries which was obviously problematic.

So, we asked ourselves a few questions:

• Why are our invoices not being delivered?
• How can we improve the likelihood that our invoices actually reach the intended destination?
• Can we get more insight into the “undeliverable” default bounce messages we get sent?

As we reached out to other contacts at our customers, we noticed they were saying a few things over and over again:

• “We never got that invoice.”
• “Jane Doe no longer works here. Please update your contact information to ap@example.com.”
• “Our apologies: your invoices got marked as SPAM so we didn’t see it.”
• “Sorry, my email inbox was full and rejected your invoices so I never saw it.”

What We Did To Fix It

As we thought about these customer responses, we realized the solution was simple. We updated our billing system to send all emails through our own DynECT Email Delivery system. Our billing system was created and set up prior to our acquisition of SendLabs (now Carrier Pigeon) which was the underlying technology in DynECT Email Delivery. It was quite easy to change the SMTP email gateway to allow this functionality.

After we made the update, we immediately had very powerful information from a billing and collections standpoint. As you can see in the images below, we could see how many emails we sent and how many were bounced.

This first image shows total email sends and high level statistics:

This next image shows a list of email addresses that bounced and the reasons why (email addresses masked):

Armed with this information, we are able to reach out to alternate contacts at our customers and get better / new contact addresses to send invoices to or have our billing email address whitelisted with.

When drilling into a reason, the code shows why that email bounced:

Results

We have noticed the use of this tool is extremely effective for billing and collections management. We are proactive in reaching out to our customers who we know didn’t get the invoices instead of waiting 30 days or more and wondering why payment wasn’t sent yet. It has improved our cash flow as more of our invoices are getting to the intended recipients and alerts us to those customers who might have turnover in the department.

If your business relies on electronic invoicing, I would strongly recommend you look at integrating the DynECT Email Delivery platform in your billing process. Need an education? Let’s talk!

That was the quote from Dyn COO Gray Chynoweth following his three day trip to San Francisco this week, accompanied by VP of Finance Joe Raczka. A trip that was built around business was mixed with a lot of pleasure involving a Valentine’s Day dinner, Patron shots, a Mercedes Benz, a house of hackers and a multiple time Super Bowl MVP.

A tale best set for a Ben Mezrich book? Decide for yourself.

The two originally were heading west to speak/appear at the Pacific Crest Emerging Technology Summit, a two-day event featuring the movers and shakers of everything from SaaS & cloud companies, infrastructure, alternative energy and tons more. Gray gave a presentation Tuesday, saw some familiar faces in clients/partners like RedHat, Tableau Software, FreshBooks and hopefully met a few new ones.

But with he and Joe stranded in San Francisco, the marketing team tried to find them a date for Valentine’s Day as they were sad to be away from their wives. Luckily, we found two in Eli Connelly of Awesome Goo and Karina Guillot of social messaging app Mumbo who were ridiculously great dates and a fun time.

She even wrote two haiku to celebrate the occasion.

when your packets drop
dyn comes in and picks them up
the day’s saved again

your tweets must go through
netflix will not watch itself
dyn makes it happen

Via friends from Mumbo, they were invited post-dinner to the infamous LikeALittle (LAL) Hacker House, seen on this TC Cribs walkthrough. The gang was supposed to meet up with Evan from LAL, who may or may not have been on a potential date (his words). The experience turned out to be a little different than expected.

“His car was in the front driveway with a flat tire and the front door was wide open. So we just walked in and gave ourselves a tour. Surprisingly enough, the house was full on Valentine’s Day night. Imagine that,” Gray explained. “Later, the Patron shots came out. Much, much later, our CPO Cory von Wallenstein came and got us, appearing out of the mist like an 80′s rock star with a pimped out Mercedes Benz. I think it was Cory, anyway. I get him confused with David Lee Roth all the time.”

While at the house, the guys met India’s top coder. “He’s won a ton of competitions. It was like shaking hands with Ted Williams, Michael Jordan or Steve Jobs in his prime,” a shaken Raczka said. “It was like…a religious experience, you know?”

Along the three day excursion, Gray and Joe met up with a ton of other friends, clients and partners like Okta, Zendesk, Zuora and VideoGenie. But there was one chance meeting that will never be forgotten. While driving with gracious host, tour guide and pal Richard Terry-Lloyd (Zuora VP of Sales), Gray spotted multi-time Super Bowl MVP and champion Joe Montana walking down the street — a once in a lifetime (triptime?) opportunity.

Prodded by his entourage, Gray made like Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible and snuck into an America’s Cup launch event Montana was attending. After a glass of wine, the crafty legal eagle got the nerve to do what many defensive linemen couldn’t do over a 15-year NFL career: corral Montana…for a photo op, anyway.

And just like that, the trip was a wrap. Both are back home in the world headquarters of Dyn, away from the big lights and big city of San Francisco…for now.

“If all that happened in just three days, imagine if we were there for a week,” Joe said. “I think a Gray/Joe World Tour might be in order. What’s Monaco like this time of year? Also, where’s Cory?”

For more pictures, visit our Facebook page.

Great DNS (inexpensive in the grand scheme of the infrastructure stack) is simply the gateway to the expenses associated with your colocation, bandwidth, monitoring (try Catchpoint), analytics, cloud hosting, CDN (try Fastly), storage, power and cooling costs. But it’s the nature of the app or site and the hosting environment behind the URL can create some pretty funky scopes for our enterprise DNS platform.

With each customer who evaluates our DynECT Managed DNS platform, we learn of new DNS use cases for our services and about the complexities of some companies’ Web infrastructure.

Here are some unnamed examples of interesting client scopes we’ve come across lately.

High traffic, ridiculously fast growth Web 2.0 client (mobile social gaming)

As Monty Hall knows, not every deal is the same.

The scope

100 domains, 100 QPS (and booming!), 5000 resource records and 200,000 emails to send

The challenge

Transparent scalability of our pricing for a company whose traffic is legitimately doubling month over month. Since our contracts are one-year commitments, this client needs to see one month, six months, one year and even two years out to prepare. Often times, we are gambling with pricing and then winning deals like this because as these clients have success, we have success.

Sometimes it’s important to offer scaled pricing before they are even at scale. Throw in our email delivery product and it’s quite an interesting client because we can grow together.

Large “build your own website” CMS company

The scope

50 domains, 15000 QPS, 500,000 resource records

The challenge

Sure, that is a lot of traffic (approximately 35+ billion DNS queries per month), but the real issue here was in scalability of pricing. The company behind this large traffic industry leader wanted to start small with a sister domain name, POC (proof of concept) for a while, and then move over the behemoth top 20 Alexa domain.

We needed to figure out a way to scope this appropriately to cover the future traffic and records. Yes, we had to price a small deal (just above entry level) for eventual “cross your finger” scale. And yes, that is also a ton of records — 100 times our average!

Extremely established, industry leading SaaS company & SMB-focused Email Service Provider (ESP)

The scope

500 domains, 2000 QPS, 1.5mm resource records, 15 DynECT Geo Traffic Management hostnames

The challenge

Whoa, that is a lot of resource records (300 times our average and allowed amount in a standard DNS package!) with a decent DNS traffic allowance. It’s also a nice chunk of brand spanking new Geo TM hostnames for use to geo-segment end user eyeballs hitting their email app.

Many times the benefits of our service are not plain to see to the average Internet user, but we’re everywhere. The importance of being able to support a client of this scale is something that we individually must evaluate closely when it comes to scoping, pricing and eventual implementation — further complicating an already relatively custom process.

Micro-blogging and social networking sensation

The scope

100 domains, 6500 QPS, 5000 resource records, Five DynECT Traffic Management hostnames (GSLB)

The challenge

How do you price a unique scope like this when they are looking for a dual vendor strategy and already using your main competitor? You ask what the evil empire is charging, of course! Well, that and you always try and get ahead of the traffic growth, which is inevitable for a client of this magnitude and profile. It’s a practical, be direct and don’t BS the prospect approach.

When advanced features like DynECT Traffic Management are thrown into the mix, it adds another layer to play with when it comes to the overall value of the deal being proposed and the eventual negotiation. At the end of the day, it is all about pricing transparency.

If you want to learn more about who we are talking about or have a unique scope yourself, we want to hear from you and chat about how the DynECT Managed DNS platform can help. As you’ve seen above, we have seen and scoped it all…and always want a new and unique challenge to figure out.

One of the areas receiving more focus in the world of email these days is email delivery rates and deliverability as a whole. But in spite of supposed positive claims from Email Service Providers (ESPs), email delivery rates are actually on the decline.

Here’s some facts, insight and more into email delivery and what you should be asking of your ESP.

What are the email delivery facts?

• In 2009, 10.5% of emails did not reach the inbox and in 2010, that number grew to 14.9%. Worse yet, 1/12 of it didn’t end up making it anywhere, vanishing into the dreaded “black hole”. If these are average stats, then it also means some senders are performing even worse than 85% delivery achievement.
• In the first half of 2011, 19% of email sent did not reach the inbox.
• More than 50% of email is sent through larger email senders (think Dyn).
• At least 90% of small businesses are sending through ESPs.

Therefore, most email being sent is either by big companies that by definition should know how to achieve good levels of deliverability or by the large ESPs that often boast 99.98% deliverability. Yet, we know that at least 20% of mails are not reaching their inbox destination. So when email vendors claim 99.98%, what does this really mean?

They are usually referring to the percentage of email delivered without bounces, but that doesn’t consider spam / deleted folders. It’s really a measure of how many emails get delivered to the ISP’s gateway. Are they right? From the stats, it’s clear there’s an issue here.

If we accept that email delivery is about simply sending, email senders are often not aware of their delivery problems. In spite of the stats, they are sending emails blind because they don’t have the tools to monitor if the mail is going to the inbox, spam folder, bounced folder or simply deleted.

What’s causing the problem?

Mainly, poor sending habits. Even those that are aware that tools are available are still causing their own problems due to their poor sending habits, either with content, sending frequency, the purchasing of lists, the lack of proactive engaged and unengaged list management practices and erratic / sudden increases in email volumes.

The importance of throttling email to ISPs and the capability to manage high volumes of email delivery over short periods of time is crucial. ISPs change their regulations and policies often, so it’s important to go with a company with established and growing relationships with those ISPs. Bad reputations stick, so avoiding these issues early is incredibly important.

Rules and regulations are different around the world. In the UK, for example, they still allow email lists to be purchased. In the U.S., CAN-SPAM regulations say you can only send to an opt-in list, be open and transparent about who you are, publish the unsubscribe button in a obvious and accessible place and above all, be a responsible sender. Canada has just issued even more strict emailing rules, so this is the way the market is going.

Often, all ESP vendors are doing what they can to ensure their clients’ mail gets delivered, have strict acceptance policies for the clients they take on and build those aforementioned relationships. But what they are failing to do is educate their clients in a proactive and meaningful way that actually changes long-term behaviour.

Part of the reason for that is it takes time. There are two ways email vendors make their money: by selling high-cost, feature-rich front end applications like list management, social media integration, list cleansing and/or back end campaign analysis or selling the classic low operational cost, high-return ecommerce model by sending as many mails as possible without having to engage with their clients. Education is extra time and time, as we know, is money.

What’s the email delivery solution?

ESP Vendors should analyse and identify the problems that each email sender is having and build an action plan to work on each of the individual components. They need to coach their clients in how they can implement the changes and keep going through this process in an iterative cycle of continuous improvement.

The ISP and email landscape is always changing, but continuous improvement will yield lots of additional ROI. Companies should take responsibility for their own email delivery and understand, check and question their own stats constantly.

Look for a solution which provides spam complaint levels for each campaign. They should have reporting of the actual email addresses that have issues, insight like inbox delivery confirmation, seed addresses or actual inbox analysis (reads, skims, etc.) and spamtraps.

Understand (or ensure your vendor does) the technical issues and terms vital for managing email IP reputation:

• Forward DNS, A and MX records
• Matching reverse DNS
• SPF and DKIM
• SMTP matching HELO
• Monitoring of abuse@ for all domains
• ISP and third party feedback such as Spamcorp
• Whitelisting
• Frequent blacklist checking
• SURBL monitoring

Engage with your ESP and ask them to coach you as to how and what you can improve. Understand how ISPs are monitoring for spamming activity like spam reporting and feedback loop tracking (AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo). Recognise the email territory is changing all the time, move with the times and outsource email delivery to experts like Dyn that can deliver the technology, the coaching,the analytics and ultimately, the inbox results.

Heard enough? Let’s talk.

Help us create a wall like this!

When I was little, my family would go on trips and we would send ourselves postcards from everywhere that we would visit and try to race them home and beat them.

This pretty much never happened, but when you’re seven years old and in the back of an ’85 Chevy van pulling a popup trailer in the middle of Nebraska with no air conditioning in July, you look forward to the little things.

Nowadays in a world where my tweet will get to you quicker than it takes to confirm that it sent from my phone, we don’t really send postcards anymore. We don’t take the time to pick out the perfect or most ridiculous one to send, let alone take a moment to share what is going at that very moment that we can then share with others.

So let’s change all that.

Based off an idea that one of our employees saw in an California office tour and in the interest of celebrating our growing customer community, we want you to send a postcard to us. Who are you and what do you do? How are the kids? What do you use Dyn for? What should we know? You know…stuff!

Send them to me at the address below and I will put them up on a very empty wall here at our Manchester office that needs some love. People are always touring our space and I think it would be very cool to show off that we have users from around the world that have stories to tell. Think about it: there are four million users of ours around the world. That’s a lot of great stories!

And as part of some random acts of kindness, I’ll send some postcards back and perhaps some Dyn swag for some that really make an impression. We’ll update on this project via social media as we go and hopefully, we’ll get so many that we’ll inspire another company to do the same thing. Who will be the first on the wall? Where’s the furthest distance someone will send someone from (looking at you, Antarctica)?

To be part of our old school social media experiment, send postcards to:

Mike Taylor
c/o Dyn
150 Dow Street – Tower Two
Manchester, NH 03101

In case you haven’t heard, Tuesday is Valentine’s Day, a day that is devoted to everything that is love. Two of our best and brightest — Dyn COO Gray Chynoweth and VP of Finance Joe Raczka — have to be in San Francisco for meetings and be away from their wives. While a romantic trip on a trolley may sound great to some, the two really want to spend it with other people…which is where you come in.

We’re holding a 24-hour contest from 12 pm EST on Monday, February 13th to 12 pm EST on February 14th for our DynECT Managed DNS / Email clients. Two lucky winners and their significant others will join Gray and Joe at COCO500, a fun & hip restaurant in San Francisco’s SOMA area.

All you have to do is tell us why you should be picked.

Turn these frowns upside down.

It could be a short video, a blog post, a haiku (a Gray favorite), skywriting, interpretive dance, a one-act play, etc. It just has to be submitted to us by noon EST Tuesday, 2/14 for consideration.

Why do you love Dyn? Have you always had a hankering to eat with a lawyer and Duke grad? Perhaps you’ve stared at COCO500 from the street and said, “Someday…someday.” That day is now.

Some rules / guidelines:

- You must be a DynECT enterprise client, either for Managed DNS or Email Delivery. Travel isn’t included, so it would help if you were local. (However, if you manage to get there in a Planes, Trains And Automobiles fashion, that would be a killer story.)

- You must submit a video, link to a blog post, poem, etc. This can’t just be a one line email. Our blue ribbon panel will choose the winners.

- You must be serious about going. This is a nice place and again, we don’t want to make Joe or Gray sad by a last-second bailout. Remember, you don’t have to pay anything…it’s on us!

- Dinner is at COCO500 at 500 Brannan Street in San Francisco at 8:45 PM local time.

- Dinner is for you and your significant other and two companies will win. Keep in mind this isn’t one of those sales dinners you might get with a financial advisor. We want to have a fun time with some of the clients that have helped in our success.

- Entries can be sent to hello@dyn.com & jnason@dyn.com with a subject line of SF Dinner Contest. Everything should be sent to us by 12 PM EST on Tuesday, February 14th, so we can pick the winners and let them know ASAP. Obviously include some contact information with your submission.

Help Gray and Joe celebrate ValenDyn’s Day and make their wives happy they’re staying out of trouble for the night!

While the number 13 might be unlucky for some, it was the margin of victory when Dyn crushed (harsh), mutilated (harsher) and eviscerated (harshest) their opponent Can’t Dodge These Shenanigans 13-0. The convincing victory moves Always Up – Better, Faster, Stronger to 3-0 and atop the NHSSC standings.

Ever the humanitarian, team captain Joe Stelmach wouldn’t kick a team while they were down.

“They were an easy team to begin with and they unfortunately showed up with only eight people,” Stelmach revealed in a post-game email, acquired exclusively by Dyn Sports.

Stelmach went on to warn his squad not to rest on their laurels for their impending Tuesday match against $14.00 the Hard Way.

“This team is slightly better and have a couple of really dodgy people, so rest up your arms.”

$14.00 the Hard Way did not respond to these comments, although Dyn Sports made zero attempts to contact them for response.

If Team Dyn repeats its performance, Al Capone may be in attendance because it would be another Valentine’s Day Massacre (definitely a stretch to fit that into this story). Although Stelmach was looking ahead to next week’s performance, he was able to appreciate the sweet taste of last week’s victory, giving the game ball to Alex Lessard for “taking out two people and being very nimbly bimbly.”

A quick consultation with the Urban Dictionary informs one that nimbly bimbly “describes how a cat jumps, typically from tree to tree.”

Team member Mike Taylor was quick to point out the exploits of Amanda Drouin and Josh Delisle who, like an unvaccinated kid at daycare, caught everything that came at them. Taylor was incredibly impressed by Delisle’s performance because he made these grabs without wearing his glasses. Upon reflection, Delisle’s showing reminded Taylor of the blind super hero, Daredevil.

“Josh Delisle is like Dyn’s Ben Affleck,” Taylor said. Delisle is currently trending on Twitter for #delislestyle.

Let’s hope for their sake that $14.00 the Hard Way aren’t a bunch of Mallrats or a Jersey Girl or The Company Men because when they come to The Town they’ll find out Dyn’s Just Not That Into You and are actually Forces of Nature that might bring them Armageddon, turn up the heat like they’re in a Boiler Room and remind them their Glory Daze are over. They’ll be so scared you could add up the Sum of all Fears as they’re Changing Lanes to Extract themselves from the State of Play. Cash your Paycheck and call Hollywoodland, Dyn’s Going All the Way.

(You try squeezing 15 Ben Affleck movies into a coherent paragraph).

Follow along with Dyn’s run to a title here.

That’s actually what the problem is.

When Alice sends Bob an email, the way it normally works is this: Alice sends the mail to her Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) mail server.  That mail server checks to make sure it’s Alice sending the mail.

Then the mail server sends the mail along to the mail server for Bob’s domain (if Bob’s address is bob@example.com, then this is the mail server for example.com).  That mail server stores the mail and when Bob checks his email, he gets the mail from his domain’s mail server.

There are ways to secure each of the steps along the way of this mail delivery chain and we have lots of protocols for making this happen. What we do not have is a policy layer that allows Alice to be confident Bob will be able to tell that the mail came from her and not some evil person pretending to be Alice.

Today, Bob can check to see how the mail that is supposed to be coming from Alice was handled in various spots along the chain. 

If everything checks out, then Bob can know that the mail did come from Alice. But if things don’t check out, Bob just has to guess: he can’t tell what Alice intends.  Worse, if Alice’s ISP gets things wrong, then Alice’s mail will look like spam and Bob might never see it.  But there’s no easy or convenient way for Bob (or his mail server) to tell Alice’s ISP that they made a mistake. On the Internet, good and effective policy needs coordination and that coordination has to be automatic.

You can’t send millions of mails every day and expect to do anything by hand.

There’s one other problem: the Internet is made of many independent networks.  It is impossible to deploy anything on the Internet that everyone has to turn on at the same time. That’s like asking two billion people to turn on all their lights at the same time. The Internet mail system is, in Internet terms, very old.  It’s been around for more than 35 years and it’s still working, so we can’t just break it. Now all of this might seem like a lot of work for nothing. Who’s going to pretend to be Alice?  Well, if “Alice” is instead “mortgage_center@mybank.com”, you can see what the problem is. DMARC is an effort to provide the missing pieces.

It lets Alice’s ISP (who sends her mail) say what to do in case mails that look like they’re from her don’t meet the tests she expects them to meet. It lets Bob (and his mail server) tell Alice’s ISP when something is going wrong. It allows both of them to communicate about apparent attempts at abuse and it is designed to do all of this at Internet scale, permitting a high degree of automation.

There is still work to be done.

The work today is experimental, but the results of the experiment are intended to become an IETF standard. There are bound to be controversies about the mechanisms as they are currently specified and experience in the experiment is bound to uncover some problems that need fixing. But all of this is a big step forward in making mail more usable again and anything that improves the email environment and ensures deliverability of legitimate mail makes us at Dyn enthusiastic.

Expect more news from us on DMARC soon.