{"id":194755,"date":"2023-06-30T12:07:12","date_gmt":"2023-06-30T12:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.internetsociety.org\/?page_id=194755"},"modified":"2025-09-09T17:11:56","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T17:11:56","slug":"dmarcian-making-email-safer","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.internetsociety.org\/about-internet-society\/organization-members\/stories\/dmarcian\/","title":{"rendered":"dmarcian:\u00a0Making Email Safer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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dmarcian: 
Making Email Safer<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/section>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Based in the US, dmarcian strives to improve email by helping organizations and individuals around the world leverage technology to protect their domains from unauthorized use. As part of its mission of thwarting cyber crime and making email communication safer, dmarcian offers free training aimed at empowering users. In 2017, recognizing that it shared many values and goals with the Internet Society, dmarcian became an organization member.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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A Conversation with Tim<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Joining a Zoom call from the lush green mountains of North Carolina, Tim spoke about his company, how it got its start, and what it\u2019s doing to make the Internet a safer place for all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Founded in 2012 in North Carolina, dmarcian<\/a> is a team of dedicated professionals based across the continental US and in six other countries. All of their efforts center around one core mission: upgrading the entire world\u2019s email by making an email authentication protocol called Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) accessible to all. DMARC gives email domain owners the ability to protect their domains from being used in business email compromise attacks, phishing emails, email scams, and other cyber threat activities. In doing this, DMARC helps improve email for everyone\u2014senders and receivers alike. The customers dmarcian serves include banks, top Internet properties, governments, marketing agencies, telecoms, and commercial enterprises of all sizes around the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harnessing Tech to Empower Users<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The DMARC protocol was developed to solve a problem that had already plagued email for decades. It was in the mid-2000s, after working for various Silicon Valley startups in different tech subfields, that dmarcian founder Tim Draegen took a special interest in email and how it could be made safer. \u201cSpam had already ramped up by the turn of the millennium,\u201d Tim says, \u201cbut filters could only do so much. The normal person who got a piece of email would still have to struggle to find out if it was real or some kind of fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Tim Draegen, Founder<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Hailing from San Jose, California, the man behind dmarcian was born in the perfect place, and at the perfect time, to develop a passion for information technology. When Tim was eight years old, in the early 1980s, his father traded a beloved family pinball machine for an Apple 2E with dual floppy drives\u2014cutting-edge technology that dazzled the boy. \u201cMy brother and sister were teenagers and had better things to do,\u201d he says, \u201cso I got to spend as much time on the computer as I wanted.\u201d Young Tim was soon playing computer games and chatting with people around the world via bulletin board systems. \u201cIt allowed me to see that the world was a much bigger place than I\u2019d thought and to realize the Internet\u2019s enormous potential as a force for good.\u201d Tim went on to study computer science and devote his career to harnessing technology to make the world a better place. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

And the stakes are high. When a cyber criminal impersonates a person or company by spoofing a domain name, they often manage to carry out illicit actions such as installing ransomware, stealing confidential information, or gaining access to a private network. Such attacks are common and can be very costly for the victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim chose to work on email as a way of making the biggest impact in terms of foiling cyber crime. \u201cEmail is by far the largest installed application on the Internet. It’s used for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon, Tim began working with other engineers on a multi-year project that culminated in the development of DMARC. \u201cIt was made public in 2012, and the second that happened, I quit my day job and started founding dmarcian. As a primary author of DMARC, I didn’t want to see it get stuck as a niche technology for big companies. I wanted to see it folded into the Internet and made available to everyone, big players and small.\u201d Thus dmarcian was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If people didn\u2019t have to spend so much time in their inbox dealing with junk mail, they could focus on things that are more meaningful to themselves and their community.\u201d<\/div>