Why your cold emails are going into the junk folder

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Welcome to the Did You Know podcast by Varisource where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.3s Hello everyone, this is Victor with various source. Welcome to another episode of the Did you know podcast. Today I'm glad to have Easydmarc Rob who is a director of Sales with me. Easydmarc essentially is a complete email security for email deliverability and protection of your domain. Welcome to the show

Rob. Thanks, Victor. Appreciate

it. Yeah. So Rob, why don't you give maybe a little background of yourself and how did you come into this Dmarc world? And there are so many discussions to be has so many questions on email, email deliverability and obviously protecting domains for any size company. So super excited to chat. 1.2s

Thank you and I appreciate the opportunity. So I am out of Atlanta, Georgia. I've been at East D market now for two years. I've been in the world of email for a long, long time, dating back to putting the first blackberries in hands of executives at a large bank. And so email is that killer app. But unfortunately, email is also the most abused app. It's inherently open to attack and to fishing. We've heard those words before. So I've kind of moved from email to more the cybersecurity space and again, been at East D mark now for two years, putting 1.3s our product out there that helps protect the domain from phishing. At the same time, DMARC is visibility on how your domain is being used for email globally. And it's also a deliverability component, improving the ability for you to get your legitimate business email to the inbox.

Yes, I think there's the two topics that everybody, every company, every role department cares about. One, security. Two is sales, right? Those two things are really the two of the most important things for every business. And the fact that you guys can do both is just looking forward to this conversation. But we talk about obviously on your website, but even DMark 1s as a staple. And can you kind of maybe quickly define for just a general audience what D mark is? And because a lot of times when I talk to people, whether they're sending cold emails or they're just sending emails, they just bought a domain or they're trying to for email deliverability, they just don't understand it. It seems like it's like foreign language to them. They're not even aware. They thought they just buy a domain and then they start sending emails and they wonder how come their emails are not getting to the inbox. There is like an art, but also a process 1.4s behind the scenes that most general public just aren't even aware. Can you kind of give us some insights into that?

Yeah, absolutely. So, D mark, fundamentally, it's built on 1.5s a foundation of two critical email security protocols called SPF and DKIM. D-K-I-M. These were technologies that came out. And five, and we won't dive into too much into those, but any mail handler, any mail host that you get your email from, Google, Microsoft, wherever, they're going to set these two things up for you when it comes to deliverability, and best practices, getting those messages to the inbox, that's where D mark comes in. D mark depends on those two critical security protocols and ensures that you are able to create a D Marc authentication compliance so that your messages get to the inbox. When you do that, in that process of creating that authentication, you're also protecting the domain. So look at this way. You're getting the good email delivered to the recipients inbox, and then you're making the bad mail get rejected. And your ability to do that globally, because D mark resides in DNS. It's an instruction to all the mail handlers globally, do this with good email and do this with bad email. 2.4s

So when you don't have those things set up, and I have a follow up to that, because 1.6s what happens when you don't have those D mark and DKI and SPF set up? And again, if you search Google, right, obviously they tell you these are the basic things you need to set up right when you get a domain. If you're going to send email, however, that's question number one. But apart from that is, if I buy a Google domain, google doesn't tell me any of the processes or buying process that, hey, you need to set these things up. So I think it makes the consumer or the user just assume that, like, well, I bought a domain, I'm now able to send email, but they're never forced or asked by Google to say, hey, make sure you set up all of these things. Why is that? Why doesn't this email handlers 1.2s make people do that? I guess, yeah,

I think that we're getting into, like, an optimal best practices type of technology. Remember, DMARC is a globally adopted standard. 1.1s DMARC doesn't sell D mark necessarily. We sell the tools and the services to implement it. So you can certainly find where Google, 365, 1.3s Yahoo, all of those mill handlers recommend D mark, 1.7s whether they're doing it prevalently or not, is a whole other story. We try to help with those things, like as far as awareness and education. 1.7s But yeah, could they be a lot better at recommending it? Absolutely. 2.2s

Yeah. And so what happens when you don't have those things set up? How does that impact your email deliverability? And obviously that's something I think every sales team for every company faces. They send email thinking, if I can just send out a thousand email, 10,000 emails, and I don't know if it's ending or not, and might be going to spam. So what impact does it have when companies aren't setting up those things correctly? With the right tools. Right. And how do you guys help with that? With easy d mark

sure. The first step of D Mark is the easiest, and it creates this visibility so you can actually see where you might be having problems with deliverability, or perhaps if you're being fished from a foreign country. The first step of D Mark is simply creating your DNS record. It's a D Mark text record and DNS, and it says, I have a policy. I am stating that I'm in discovery mode, so I just want reports sent. And what we do is we collect those reports, sometimes dozens of reports a day, sometimes even for larger companies, could be getting into the hundreds per week. These reports are very garbled. It's machine language, so you can't read them on your own. We collect the reports, interpret them, and present them graphically. And it tells a story. And all that sounds complex, but it literally is just one text record that you create in DNS. And it starts the clock. It gets us the reports and we present everything and show you messages from your HubSpot. Or salesforce are having an issue being delivered because they're not set up on SPF correctly. Or perhaps, as I mentioned the other example, it looks like someone in Brazil this week is deciding to use your domain and sending messages, pretending to be someone in your organization. So that visibility is really the first critical part of D. Marc and the ability to see who is using your domain.

Yeah, so basically, any salesperson who wants your email deliverability improved should reach out to Varysaurus and Rob for sure. So obviously the email deliverability more sales focus, and that's important for companies. However, even more importantly, and I think what you guys created, easy D Mark is on the security side. And so obviously, security today, 1.2s there's just so many ways for a company to get attacked. But we all know that email and fishing is one of the top right loopholes. And so how does Demarc or these things impact, like, what some of the risk and loopholes that people are utilizing email for phishing? And how do you guys protect against them? 1.5s

Sure. So remember we talked about DNS and it's a record in DNS. As far as D mark, 1.1s one of the things with DNS is that everyone can see it. And that means bad guys. Bad guys can see it too. So you can go to easy D mark us. And the first thing you see on that landing page is a field for your domain. So you can enter your domain, see if you even have D mark protection in place. You can see anyone can see if you are protecting your domain from phishing attacks just by seeing if D mark is set up. So that's one of the first things that these attackers look for. So 1.6s once you have the mark in place I mentioned, you're just setting it in discovery mode. That's kind of the first step, when you are able to get that visibility and you're able to pinpoint who the good guys are sending on your behalf. Let's say think about your HR systems, QuickBooks and Upspot, salesforce, marketing, MailChimp, many, many, many examples. Once you've identified those and you set them up correctly and you feel good about your messages being delivered, your good messages being delivered to the inbox, then it's time to protect the domain. Then it's time to put the security wheels in motion. And you do that with that same DNS record. Remember I mentioned the first stage is just saying, hey, I'm in a discovery mode, send me reports. The next phase is, hey everyone, I'm in a Quarantine mode. So I'm going to instruct every mail handler globally that handles a message stating to be from my domain. That if it doesn't 1s align with my security protocols, that I want you to mark it as junk. So deliver it. You can still deliver it to the end user, the recipient, but I want you and deliver it to their junk folder. That's what Quarantining means in the day mark world. 1.5s And so that is certainly a protection because you're putting the recipient on guard, so to speak, that that message was routed to the junk folder. 1.7s The next phase of D mark takes even more severe action and tells tells the mail handler to reject the message outright. So you might be in that quarantine phase for a short period of time, making sure you're not impacting any good mail. But after that, you want to get to the reject phase, the last phase of the mark. And again, that's where you're instructing through that DNS entry all mail handlers globally, if it doesn't meet the certain criteria on my email security, reject it, don't even deliver it to the junk folder. And that's a great state to be 1.3s attackers. See that in DNS, you're less likely to even be attacked, 1s and you're protecting the domain from phishing because you've got that reject in place.

So I want to break that down a little bit, because one of the things that I learned from talking to you and partnering with you guys and shocking to me, well, first of all, coming back to somebody goes to your website, they can enter their domain and see if their own company is protected. You're seeing that the bad guys can see it. So let's say you enter the website domain and it's not protected, meaning the bad guys can also see that, wow, you're basically leaving the front door open, right? And so how easy is it to then take over? Like, what risk? And how easy is it for the bad guys to say, oh, you're not protected, so I can just send out email as your company under your domain? When I heard that, I'm like, wow, you can just hide a domain like that so easily for these bad guys. Can you kind of talk through that? Because I think that's really shocking for a lot of people that would think they're very well protected. 1.4s

Yeah, it is shocking. It is easy and it's cheap and it happens everywhere. The US. Is in the top five of offending countries for fishing attacks. As far as 1.1s those people that are doing the phishing attacks, 1.9s as I mentioned, email is one of the it's just wide open, unfortunately, and people are taking it, the fishers are taking advantage of it. If you look at the stats, I think it's both Sans and institute and IBM issued report saying that most cyber attacks, most successful cyber attacks started with a phishing email. And those stats are somewhere around 85% to 90% of the cyber attacks started with a phishing email. So 2.4s it's easy to do. All someone has to do is get a server, open up, get an IP address, and open up a port 25 connection to 1.3s a mail relay. They can change their display name, they can change their email from address to whatever they want. And it's sad, but it's very true. 2.2s And that's what D marks for, right? To prevent and for you to tell mail handlers, wait, this one isn't passing the email security protocols I put in place. So 1s don't send that email because it's bad.

Yes, I think we've all in the corporate world where we've gotten emails from the CEO or the CFO or something, an email right, with their name and said and I think that's what you mean by phishing, right? It's so realistic. It's not even a fake domain, right? I mean, I think that's maybe a lower level where it's like they're sending you email, but if you check the domain, it's actually not the same. And you could probably spot that a little bit easier. But then the fishing, the more sophisticated attack is even branding as your company domain, which seems legitimate. Like you said, it's so easy. And that's the shocking part. 1.2s Meaning I think everybody should really check it and really get a solution, like you guys. But 2.1s

I heard a customer say not having a D mark record in place is like going in and parking your car in a bad neighborhood with the keys in the ignition and the windows down. Like that analogy. 1.2s And 1.3s it sounds crazy, but when you think about it, as you state, you can see, even the bad guys can see if you have it in place in DNS. So don't you, don't leave yourself wide open. 1.7s

Yeah. So obviously this D Mark, like you said, it's been a standard for a long time. And for those people, whether it's it teams or even the sales side, even if they set those things up, 1.4s there's a lot of a lot of different solutions for D market out there in the market. So what made you guys want to create Easyd market? How does it differentiate from other, I guess, D Mark solutions out there, do you think?

Sure. Our founders started easydmark. They worked for a start up and they were getting major phishing attacks, a very recognizable name. And so they set out to get a DMAR solution and they realized most of the DMC solutions out there were very technical. The solutions assumed that you are a subject matter expert in all these email security protocols. We've talked about several acronyms on this call alone and it can get a little intimidating. So they created a platform that was much more friendly to more of just the general It professional that understands domains, understands how to set a DNS record and view reports graphically. We hear customers tell us that all the time. That finally I found a solution where it's presenting something that I can interpret and that is actionable. I know how to put something in place, to stop something or to improve email deliverability. 3s So one, I think that's a big differentiator. Second, I think they've done really well from the product perspective in really looking a little bit beyond the mark, because just having a D mark aggregation tool, there's certainly a few out there. But complementing that with the ability to manage SPF, which can be really hairy center policy framework, it's always a moving target. 1.6s And then making that all hosted on the platform to where I don't have to keep going into DNS, I don't have to keep going to my email sources like the HubSpot and salesforce of the world. I can manage everything in one place. All those email security protocols we keep talking about, 1s all of that in one place. And not to confuse anything, there's a new one called Bimi bimi, that's a new email security protocol that depends on D mark, depends on SPF, depends on DKIM, and is really in high demand too, because Apple and Google both announced support for it. 1s So this world of email security is constantly evolving and changing. And my message is that our product is adapting to manage all of these things in one place. 1.7s

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things, again, for various you know, we love bringing innovative solutions and unique solutions into our technology buying platform because there are many D marks out there. But you guys have the complete 1.2s solution, like you mentioned, is very well thought out. It's so easy to use, I could even use it, which is I'm somewhat technical, but I'm not super technical. And even I could use it and understand it. And also obviously very cost competitive as well as what's in the market, especially for what you guys offer and because of the hands on approach you guys offer and support, it's great. Also, for enterprise, it's not just you made it easy for the SMB clients who may not have a lot of resources, but you also have sophistication enough for enterprises. So 1.9s that's one of the reasons we're excited to 1.6s partner with you

guys. Thanks. I think that's a really good observation and because the nature of the market being a global standard that all mail handlers recommend. I'm talking I was talking to a customer with 26,000 employees yesterday, and I was talking to a potential customer this morning with 250 employees, a local school district. So everyone needs it. It's just do you have the right tools? 1.3s Is it accessible and can you put it in place? And we help with all those.

So, Rob, here's an interesting one. So those two cases, right? Do you mostly find that when you talk to these customers, do they already have the D mark and they're just looking for something cheaper, better, faster? What's their pain from what they have today? What you usually see, or do you usually see clients that obviously the smaller company, they don't even have D mark or they had maybe a phishing attack, and now they're like, wow, I need to do something. What do you typically see out there? 2.3s

Usually the general rule of thumb is the smaller the environment, from a mailbox size and sending volume, the smaller the numbers, the easier it is to get D mark in place and move through those stages of enforcement that I mentioned quarantine and reject. The reason it's easier is because you might only have one or two sources. A small biz, right, uses maybe MailChimp. They have maybe a CRM. So you get those set up, and everything is D market compliant, then you can move to D. Martin enforcement probably would only take you a few weeks, a month to get all of that in place. You look at the larger organizations that gave the example of a company with 260 employees. They're using subdomains. They're using many sources. Sources are services that send on your behalf. You want them to use their platform to send the messages using your domain, and you want those messages delivered to the inbox. And so what we see a lot is DMark will be deployed in that first stage of discovery, and then it stops. And then the larger organizations, they get in place. They realize. 1.6s How they have a lot of sources and then it's incumbent upon them to align the sources and move through enforcement. That's where it gets a little hairy, maybe intimidating. So we help with that. On our higher tier plans, we basically say we'll give you the reporting, but we'll also assign you a D Mark engineer. This is a guy or a girl that lives, eats and breathes these email security protocols every day. They know all the tricks. They know how to do the source authentication for dozens of different sources, and they can tell you when it's time to start moving through that stages of enforcement. 1.1s So we have many customers that choose that level of support 1.4s and after that implementation, when they're at that policy of reject, they are sleeping much better at night, knowing the domain is protected and knowing at the same time all the departments are really pleased with mail deliverability rates really high. That's just getting to the inbox. Sales is happy, marketing is happy, HR, accounting, all those departments. So the hero.

Yeah, I mean the email thing is so critical to every business. Imagine sending emails 1.1s for sure. I'd love to. Excited to extend this conversation to a webinar that you can show how the platform works. One of the last question as we wrap up here that I love to ask guests is obviously you've been through a lot of places, seen a lot. If you had to give the audience that any personal business advice, one advice that you really are passionate about, what would it be you think. 3s

Specific to the solution in DMark or just in

general? No, just in general. Obviously the economy is going crazy. We got the COVID I mean, the whole world. I mean, it's hard to run a business whether you're SMB or Enterprise, but just in your own kind of world, what would be one advice you would give people in general about whether it's personal or business that you want to share?

Yeah, I would say just look for those opportunities 1.6s to decompress, turn things off for me. If I just close my email client and my instant messaging slack, I find my stress level just immediately lowers it. You don't see the Immediacy anymore. And so I think when you complement that with opening a window and just kind of taking the air in my daughter's got me into vinyl now, so maybe put a record on. Just the act of having to take your time to get the album out of the sleeve and put it on. Making sure not to scratch the record causes you to slow down and take it all in. I was actually watching a really good tech talk. Someone had mentioned, you know, you're at your best when things are quiet and you're thinking, so put yourself in that state. 1.5s

Yeah, that's fantastic. I know it's easier said than done. You know, there's so much information. And again, honestly, you do a great job supporting customers and partners like us. And when you're good at what you do, people want more of it, which is a good thing. But then I think that puts a lot of pressure and stress on you as well, to have to do everything. But now you're doing a fantastic job. You guys have a fantastic product, and as your partner, we're excited to help you bring this to the world.

Thanks, Victor. I appreciate that. Thanks for the time. 1.2s Dmarc is fun. It's a real eye opener. So I've enjoyed being in this space. And when you're able to flip a switch and show a customer all these things they didn't see before, it can be really 1.1s fun. And actionable. So glad to help and looking forward to continue conversation.

That was an amazing episode of the digital podcast with their source. Hope you enjoy and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guests today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com

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