What is a DMARC Policy?

DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance.” A DMARC Policy tells the email receivers like Microsoft (Hotmail, Live, Outlook etc), Gmail, Yahoo! and other DMARC Internet Service Providers who adopted DMARC what to do if an email fails the DMARC check.

 

What is the DMARC policy?

Gmail joins Yahoo and AOL by implementing the strict DMARC policy. It has been developed in order to defend email users from a large amount of spam and phishing messages. Applying this policy means that emails from @gmail.com, @aol.com and @yahoo.com (the entire list of domains is available here) can be sent using only their original servers.

If you send bulk email campaigns with any 3rd party email marketing software and use a Yahoo, Gmail or AOL email address as the sender’s email address (a.k.a. FROM email), your emails will be rejected (hard bounce). Why? Because the emails you sent were from servers of your email marketing software instead of from a Google, Yahoo or AOL server.

This problem applies to all 3rd party email marketing software (not only CareCart).

How it works?

DMARC’s alignment feature prevents spoofing of the “header from” address by:

Matching the “header from” domain name with the “envelope from” domain name used during an SPF check, andMatching the “header from” domain name with the “d= domain name” in the DKIM signature.