fraudmarc

Fraudmarc, Inc. is an email security company focused on brand identity protection through the open email authentication protocols SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Its stated mission is to make the Internet safer by securing email, and it positions its offerings around making domains difficult to spoof while preserving email deliverability. The product line spans self-service and full-service options: Universal SPF and SPF Compression℠ for keeping SPF records compliant and avoiding "SPF PermError: Too many DNS lookups" failures caused by excessive DNS lookups; DMARC reporting and analysis tools, including per-user DMARC detail and vendor-level breakdowns; and Outbox Protection, a managed service in which Fraudmarc secures all of a customer's domains and drives them to strict DMARC enforcement with limited work by the customer's own team.

The company also publishes free utilities — an SPF record checker, a DMARC policy checker, an email security check tool and several ESP verification tools — and maintains Fraudmarc Community Edition (CE), an open-source DMARC aggregate report analysis platform. CE v2 is a serverless application deployed on AWS and AWS GovCloud using CDK/CloudFormation, with AWS SES for report ingestion, Lambda for processing, API Gateway with a Cognito authorizer, CloudFront/S3/ACM for custom-domain hosting, and a private RDS instance in a VPC; the frontend is Angular v16 and the backend Go 1.22 (upgraded from Angular v6 and Go 1.10). CE supports multiple users and a single centralized rua reporting address covering unlimited domains, and lets operators choose an AWS region to satisfy data residency requirements. The project documents typical monthly AWS running costs of under about $5, driven mainly by IP addresses ($3.75), Route 53 ($0.50) and Secrets Manager ($0.40).

Founding story

Fraudmarc participated in the Techstars accelerator as part of the Techstars Atlanta class of 2017 and describes itself as a Techstars company that embraces the #givefirst philosophy, which it cites as a reason for making many of its tools and its DMARC analysis platform free and open source.

Business model

Fraudmarc sells email authentication software and managed services on a products-and-pricing basis, spanning self-service tools (Universal SPF, SPF Compression, DMARC reporting) and a full-service managed offering, Outbox Protection. Free plans and free tools sit alongside paid enterprise plans, and the open-source Community Edition is self-hosted by users on their own AWS accounts, with the hosted commercial DMARC services positioned as the easier alternative.

Paid product plans and subscriptions for SPF and DMARC tooling plus a full-service managed offering, with free tiers and free diagnostic tools used to reach smaller users; enterprise plans serve larger senders.

Traction

The Fraudmarc CE open-source repository has 161 stars, 30 forks, 14 watchers and 155 commits, and states it has been in use by government bodies, businesses and individuals since 2018. The company reports enterprise plans supporting high-volume Internet senders, and publishes a customer testimonial from Timothy at CyberSecOp.com. Third-party listings place headcount at 1-10 employees.

Latest developments

Fraudmarc CE v2 is the current release of the open-source platform, adding multi-user support via AWS Cognito, custom domain hosting through CloudFront, S3 and ACM, a serverless API Gateway and Lambda backend, private RDS database hosting on a free-tier arm64 instance, managed DNS, security hardening with Secrets Manager, IAM policies, security groups and private VPC subnets, and infrastructure automation with AWS CDK and CloudFormation, alongside upgrades to Angular v16 and Go 1.22.