DMARC – What is it and how does it affect mail deliverability?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) offer solutions to help you secure your domains from fraudulent use and misrepresentation. Using these protocols properly through the medium of DMARC can positively affect your email deliverability. Without it, you may lose out on valuable email communication.

SPF and DKIM provide mechanisms for someone to prove that they sent a given message. However, these methods are not fool proof – Neither system says what an ISP should do if they receive an email that is either unauthenticated or fails authentication.

Which is where DMARC comes into the picture 

DMARC is an email authentication standard for receiving mail servers to determine how to evaluate emails that claim to be from your domain, whether to accept, quarantine or reject and who to notify of failures.

DMARC also requires “alignment,” which is about consistency between the domain used in an email’s headers and those in the authentication.

What if I don’t have DMARC set?

Despite the security benefits, it is however observed that most organizations don’t bother with DMARC. They believe it won’t affect their email deliverability.

If you don’t publish a DMARC policy, the ISP step in and take an independent action. If it finds alignment is not proper for an email, it would affect the email deliverability, simple as that. A successful mail delivery system also checks for alignment besides authentication.

ISPs work to block phishing and other messages; poorly authenticated emails are caught in the net.

If you’ve no DMARC record set on the assumption that it doesn’t negatively impact you, it’s time to make a change. Don’t rely on your ISP; only you know what’s best for your business. In time, authentication and DMARC will effectively become mandatory. Alignment failure may still hurt your deliverability.

It’s an easier job for DMARC to verify alignment and with the right policy in place it can tell receiving server how to deal with incoming emails.

We believe security should not become an overhead, but something that gives you peace of mind. That is why, we are offering a free health check of your DMARC status. Head over to our DMARC analyser and get your DMARC status checked. If you find the result to be unfavourable, and realize DMARC is necessary for you, contact us. We will help you achieve proper DMARC compliance.