The world’s largest mailbox providers have agreed that it’s time to actively protect recipients from unwanted spam and potential bad actors before reaching their inboxes.
According to their new guidelines, all email domains must have a DMARC policy in their DNS. A DMARC record helps ISPs identify that the sender is following established email standards and reduces the spam liability.
Additionally, sending messages from a domain that has DMARC in place, improves inbox placement. Messages, including those sent on behalf of an organization by third-party email service providers (ESPs), must pass DMARC Alignment, or they will not be delivered.
Here’s the roadmap of their guidlines’ enrollment:
February 2024
Regardless the volume, all senders must comply with the general email sending practices outlined in the guidlines. Bulk email senders must start implementing enhanced requirements, including email authentication.
April 2024
Messages that are not compliant will start getting rejected.
June 2024
Senders must implement one-click unsubscribe in all commercial and promotional messages.
What are the requirements?
In order to avoid non-compliance consequences, organizations must follow these steps:
Authenticate outgoing e-mails
Avoid sending unwanted or unsolicited e-mails
Make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe
Requirements for all senders
- Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your domain.
- Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records (PTR).
- Use a TLS connection for transmitting email.
- Keep spam rates below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher.
- Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322).
- Don’t impersonate Gmail and Yahoo From: headers. This might impact your email delivery.
- If you regularly forward email, including using mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email.
Additional requirements for bulk senders
- Set up DMARC email authentication for your sending domain.
- Set your DMARC enforcement policy to none.
- For direct mail, the domain in the sender’s From: header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. This is required to pass DMARC alignment.
- Marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body.
Who is affected?
Now, if you’re a smaller sender or primarily engage in transactional emails, you might feel a bit shielded from the immediate impact – but here’s the thing: you can’t afford to overlook these changes.
What’s imperative for large senders today is poised to evolve into a universal requirement for all senders in the near future. Hovering in the “barely compliant” territory and hoping to slip under the radar because you’re a smaller player is seldom a winning strategy.
We firmly believe that this principle resonates strongly in the realm of email communication.
What should I do to comply with the requirements?
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