Thank you for your interest in joining the Domain Assurance Council (DAC). The DAC is in its first year of existence, and looks forward to serving its members and the greater Internet community in the coming years.

Membership Features

The Domain Assurance Council is the central source for organizations that vouch for the owners of domain names, for the types of email services that domain owners use, and for those owners' conformance to good principles and good practice in those email services. As a stable, vendor-neutral body, DAC will help its members by supporting the market as a whole and focusing the market's development for the benefit of both its members and Internet mail users.

The Council's value propositions to its members include:

• A centralized location where potential customers can see who is in the industry and get descriptions of each member's products

• An authoritative organization who publishes best-practices documents to which members can voluntarily adhere

• Technical leadership in creating and implementing standards that are useful to its members, such as DKIM extensions for mail certifiers and reputation services

• Interoperability testing coordination for protocols that affect DAC's mission, such as DKIM

• Vendor-neutral association leadership who can talk to the press about industry-wide issues and can promote the industry at conferences

DAC intends to have occasional planning meetings, co-located with relevant industry meetings such as the IETF or MAAWG.

All members are identified by category on the Council's web site, with an organization logo and link to the member's web site. The DAC membership list will be looked to as defining the significant companies in the domain certification and mail reputation markets. All members receive the Council's quarterly newsletter. Members may submit appropriate items for inclusion in newsletters.

All members who joined by July 2006 are noted as Founding members in addition to their membership category.

DAC is recognized by the IRS as a 510(c)(6) non-profit organization.

Membership Categories

The Domain Assurance Council offers several categories of membership:

The DAC's membership consists of four overlapping sets of organizations. Mail certification organizations assure recipients that the senders' mail should be considered legitimate. Mail technology companies, such as vendors of email clients and enterprise-level SMTP servers, and Internet domain registries and registrars incorporate the technologies for this type of domain assurance. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often will use the services of the certification organizations to help their customers understand the origin of their mail. And, of course, senders who want to show that they are following good Internet mail practices will want to work within the domain assurance framework used by the other DAC members. All four types of companies need an organization like the DAC.

Full members direct the work of the Council. In consultation with the Council's leadership, they decide on the activities that the Council will undertake, and review standards and other documents that the Council creates during the development process. They may register proprietary message category names.

Client, Technology, and ISP members have early access to the Council's standards and documents, and may submit comments that will affect the final material. They may register proprietary message category names, so long as at least one Full member concurs.

Your Next Step

Consult the list above to determine which class of membership would be most appropriate for your organization. Then, fill out the DAC membership form and mail it (along with payment for the first years' dues) to DAC at:

Domain Assurance Council
Post Office Box 727
Trumansburg, NY 14886

If you have any questions, please contact John Levine by email or by telephone at +1 831 480 2300.