DMARC Policy Enforcement – the Myth

Policy enforcement can be one of the most valuable aspects of DMARC. Unfortunately, only 80% of businesses are taking advantage of it, primarily due to misunderstandings of the technology that lead to fear. Let’s investigate some of the myths and payoffs to adopting restrictive DMARC policies.

Myth 1 – DMARC Policy enforcement is complicated

Truthfully, it is more complicated that simply adopting DMARC. Many companies simply created a DMARC record to comply with Google and Yahoo bulk sender requirements. However, with DMARC policy enforcement, businesses need to iteratively adopt strict policies, monitor the outcomes and then designate someone to actively monitoring DMARC compliance rates. While this appears more complex, you can easily accomplish this with a service, like MxToolbox Delivery Center, that integrates iterative policy adoption, monitors your SPF, DKIM and DMARC compliance rates and alerts you to possible issues.

Myth 2 – DMARC policy won’t improve my email campaign performance

While a strict DMARC policy does not appear to aid email campaign delivery directly, it actually affects your spam rate. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have adopted Bulk Sender requirements that mandate a maximum spam rate, the percentage of emails from a domain marked as spam by their users. With an open DMARC policy spammers and fraudsters can send email that appears to come from your domain and is likely to be marked as spam. By adopting a strict DMARC policy, you are filtering out that poor quality email from spammers and fraudsters before it could be marked as spam. By reducing your apparent spam rate, setting up a strict DMARC policy will actually improve your inbox performance.

DMARC enforced email indicates that a business takes ownership of its email delivery.

Myth 3 – A strict DMARC policy might block legitimate email

Unfortunately, this is the most pervasive belief in the industry. While there is some truth to this belief, when properly configured and monitored, there is minimal risk of losing legitimate email to strict DMARC policy enforcement. Using a DMARC management, reporting and monitoring tool like MxToolbox’s Delivery Center, businesses will have all the tools necessary to set a strict DMARC policy, monitor senders for DMARC compliance and alert when a sender is non-compliant. With proper setup, the only email you might lose to strict DMARC enforcement:

  • New senders not authorized in the SPF record lacking correct DKIM setup. Monitoring tools will quickly alert to missing senders like this.
  • Forwarded or mailing list emails that improperly modify the header and break the DKIM signature. While ARC was intended to address this issue, most forwarders now respect the DKIM signature, so this problem is vanishing.
  • DKIM Key rotation errors. This issue should be quickly discovered and short lived.

How can MxToolbox help?

MxToolbox has over 20 years experience in Email Delivery with Blacklist, DMARC and Inbox Placement solutions designed to improve your email delivery and get your email to the inbox. DMARC policy enforcement is an integral piece of the email delivery puzzle and our tools make it easy to adopt DMARC and migrate to a strict enforced DMARC policy. Learn more about MxToolbox Delivery Center.