dmarcian: 
Making Email Safer

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.

A Conversation with Tim

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’s doing to make the Internet a safer place for all.

Founded in 2012 in North Carolina, dmarcian 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’s 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—senders 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.

Harnessing Tech to Empower Users

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. “Spam had already ramped up by the turn of the millennium,” Tim says, “but 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.”

Tim Draegen, Founder

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—cutting-edge technology that dazzled the boy. “My brother and sister were teenagers and had better things to do,” he says, “so I got to spend as much time on the computer as I wanted.” Young Tim was soon playing computer games and chatting with people around the world via bulletin board systems. “It allowed me to see that the world was a much bigger place than I’d thought and to realize the Internet’s enormous potential as a force for good.” Tim went on to study computer science and devote his career to harnessing technology to make the world a better place.

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.

Tim chose to work on email as a way of making the biggest impact in terms of foiling cyber crime. “Email is by far the largest installed application on the Internet. It’s used for everything.”

Soon, Tim began working with other engineers on a multi-year project that culminated in the development of DMARC. “It 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.” Thus dmarcian was born.

Access to Knowledge for All

Once DMARC was operational, Tim turned his efforts to advocating for it. Via dmarcian, he began working to introduce it to as many people as possible and to facilitate its use. From the start, he knew this would involve educating the public—first, so they would know it existed, and second, so they could learn to implement it effectively.

DMARC Academy will soon be released in languages other than English too. By offering such accessible training in this groundbreaking technology, dmarcian is enabling people anywhere in the world, from any socioeconomic background, to learn about DMARC and leverage this knowledge to protect their business or boost a career.

The Importance of an Open Global Internet

For Tim and his team, it’s clear that an open global Internet is a non-negotiable prerequisite for further human progress. Like many other Internet players, dmarcian wants to see the Internet continue as the borderless worldwide resource it was designed to be, free from governmental or corporate fragmentation and the detrimental effects such isolation brings.

“The private companies and really large governments that make their own walled gardens kind of take some of the promise of the Internet away,” Tim says. “The promise being that everybody would be able to connect to each other—with the Internet as an intermediary—to develop ideas and hopefully learn from each other to do better as a collection of humans.”

Another key benefit of an open Internet is the ability to work with the right talent, no matter where they’re located. This is invaluable in the tech industry, where experts tend to be scattered around the globe. With its staff and customers based on multiple continents, as Tim explains, dmarcian couldn’t do business at all if there were no open global Internet.

“We have a distributed office setup, meaning that all our employees work remotely,” he says, “although local staff sometimes come to our small North Carolina office for a change of scenery.”

On the other side of the coin, the ability to work remotely, made possible by the open global Internet, allows employees and entrepreneurs to choose where they live according to their own preferences. Tim, for example, wanted to take a distance from Silicon Valley. “I got tired of the neverending tech ambiance, driving past billboards trying to sell you the most secure cloud.” He opted to instead surround himself with real clouds in the alpine landscape of southern Appalachia, where he founded dmarcian.