No business can afford to have their outgoing email to their customers, prospects, and business partners land in spam folders or quarantine. Yet if they don’t comply with the DMARC email authentication requirements, they’ll soon find that happening more and more.
This is a greenfield opportunity for MSPs to sell DMARC compliance services, according to Mike Anderson, global channels director of EasyDMARC, a cloud-native email security provider. “In security, it’s the hottest thing going right now, and mainly because people found their email deliverability going down,” says Anderson.
The DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, And Conformance) protocol helps email domain owners protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing. It uses SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to help verify that an email sender is legitimate, automatically rejecting, quarantining, or reporting on emails that fail checks. While not a new protocol, DMARC compliance has picked up steam with both Google and Yahoo announcing that “bulk senders” (B2C) will be required to implement it in 2024.
In addition, “Microsoft is signaling that they’re going to make it mandatory,” says Anderson, who joined EasyDMARC in January 2023 to build the company’s channel program.
Anderson says MSPs have a massive revenue opportunity to help their customers come into compliance. He points to recent research from EasyDMARC that finds over half of IT decision makers surveyed say they lack the expertise and resources to implement email authentication tools.
Today, just 37% of organizations comply with the updated email authentication requirements Google and Yahoo are rolling out, according to the survey. Moreover, 40% of those respondents point to the complexity of implementation as a major barrier to adoption.
Here’s something for MSPs to note: 54% of respondents say they’d outsource DMARC implementation to an IT provider, consultancy, or specialist service.
How EasyDMARC Works For MSPs
Six-year-old EasyDMARC offers “a platform for our service providers to be able to gather the intelligence for their customer and then be able to have documentation and be able to fix those alignment issues so that the end customer can have their DMARC policy in place and remove all of those problems,” Anderson says.
“We really hold the hand of the MSP through the training process, the documentation process to be able to solve [for compliancy], and then the outcome to be able to monitor it on an ongoing basis and charge that Holy Grail of revenue, the MRR.”
He adds, “It’s an extremely profitable services model.”
EasyDMARC began its foray into the channel about three years ago. “But it wasn’t MSP centric,” says Anderson, who previously built an MSP channel model for ITBoost, which ConnectWise acquired in 2019. “So when I came aboard, we made some changes in the program, added MSP features, multitenancy, multiuser reporting [and] alerting. … then put in a very robust training up front so that the MSPs know how to use the platform. In addition to that, we put a very vast marketing and sales enablement program in behind it.”
Until now, adoption of DMARC has been low. But as sending providers move from optional to mandatory, MSPs have a new category of service they can add to their practice, he notes. “When you think there’s 350 million domains and only about 5–6% of them are secured across the globe, do the math on what an MSP can go get. … This is absolutely a new category that they add into their stack, either blended in or as a line item.”
EasyDMARC currently has about 1,000 MSP partners. The month-to-month subscription is $10 per domain, with a minimum of 10 domains.
Anderson says he is aiming to double the number of MSP partners this year. He concludes, “It’s not too late to get into the market even if you haven’t started yet.”
