You may have heard about DMARC, in relation to email marketing and transactional emails. But what is exactly the definition of DMARC, and what does it do?
What is DMARC?
DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. DMARC is yet another technology that ISPs and ESPs use to ward off SPAM in addition to SPF and DKIM.
DMARC record is a configuration of a domain record that tells the receiving computer what to do with messages if they are coming from a computer with a different domain compared to the one specified on the “Reply To” field.
For instance, at we configured our DMARC policies such that if someone else sends an email from their computer (which cannot have our domain), but set the Reply To as: “[email protected]”, then the accepting computer should report this incident to us.
So far so good? Well DMARC – has been used sparingly for some time. Different companies were doing pretty much the same as us: just reporting these incidents. A lot of companies however, haven’t implemented DMARC.
How does DMARC affect email marketers?
If you are sending emails from your email service providers servers (or if you are using any ESP), and you use your personal Yahoo! (or AOL) email as a “Reply To”, then most ISPs like Microsoft, Google etc will simply reject your emails because Yahoo asked them to!
The solution to this is to use your corporate email address. Yahoo! and AOL logic is easy to understand: they provide free email service to individuals. It is tough to get big volume sending through personal accounts right, and send mass emails through outlook for instance.
If an email address they provide is also used to send mass emails from another ESP, than this is kind of a violation of the agreement on your end (I’m not a lawyer, do not hold my feet to the fire:)). Instead of sending from [email protected], you will have to switch to [email protected] to solve this problem.
Bottom Line
If you are sending mass email on behalf of your company, always use your corporate email for this. If you are a blogger, and represent yourself then take this opportunity to get your own domain and build a better brand for yourself! Happy emailing!