Funded in 2025 – Email dates back over fifty years, but it is still one of the most widely used internet technologies. It is used for many official types of communication, but also for example for mission critical functions like resetting passwords and sending invoices. Metadata about email (who communicates when, with whom) is a strategic target.

Universities have massively shifted their email infrastructure to third party email providers, and thus share a lot of information about their students and staff involuntarily with these tech giants. With the increasing pressure of politics on academic freedom, and in the light of the current geopolitical situation as well as the known surveillance capabilities these providers are legally subject to, universities around the globe are starting to understand that such a dependency is unwise. This likely over time will mean a return to running ones own infrastructure as an academic community.

For that to work, the right technical setup needs to be in place. There is good software available to run servers to send, receive, store and distribute email – with protocols such as SMTP and IMAP. However, on top of that well-known stack meanwhile another layer of infrastucture has emerged to combat spam, phishing and spoofing of email. This is done with newish standards like SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

What is currently lacking in order for academia to run this infrastructure themselves is reliable free and open source software to properly manage the resulting information flows. This is the topic of DMARCaroni: a set of tools for processing DMARC reports and turning the wealth of information into actionable overviews and reports. DMARCaroni is written in Haskell, Rust and Elm. Within the scope of this project, the team will focus on a number of missing reporting capabilities (in particular to better understand spoofing attacks), improved data acquisition and deployment methods, and increasing accessibility.