alt Hacker News"Lazy people"? I only heard about this because a customer complained. Am I supposed to go around the Internet, checking what each mail server will allow or deny?
Replies
To be fair, DMARC has been required for a very long time. IIRC Google warned about 2 years ago circa that non-compliant emails would land in spam or be null-routed. And the DMARC noise started even before that.
As a company we realised about 12 months ago that email can no longer be considered a reliable method of communication. I understand the reasoning but the result is the result. Many new clients we deal with have whitelists on and we have to pester our clients to add us to their lists. Not a great experience for anyone. I think we should consider email pretty much moribund at this point.
You don't have to, this is the key reason to have a DMARC monitoring service. It will tell you when there's a deliverability issue with some particular receiver.
DMARC applies not on your mail server, inbound or outbound, but on the server that is receiving your mail (which may in fact be your mail server).
That server will look at how the mail authenticates and decide if it should allow the mail to proceed, it (for the most part) will then tell you whether or not it allowed the mail. This is how you will know you might have a deliverability problem before your customers do.
If you're wanting to know about deliverability (particularly for this Microsoft case), my company (Alesian Security) has a free check at https://alesiansecurity.com/try?tab=deliverability
If running a mail server is central to your business, you should keep up with best practices. If not, 2 days of non-delivery aren't important, just resend.
Delivery to Microsoft's products has been patchy for several years. I am not remotely an email deliverability expert but I have made different SMTP service choices based on how companies approach shared-IP sending plans.
Some can affordably deliver to Microsoft because they aggressively police what they are actually sending on their customers' behalf; others don't get involved and you end up having to spend a fortune on a dedicated IP.
The DMARC thing is just another part of this; one of my clients discovered this silent failure themselves a few weeks back and addressed this.
No. You're supposed to understand how mail works on the Internet, and configure it correctly so that everyone else accepts it.
Go to https://mail-tester.com. Send a test email. If you don't get 10/10, fix your shit.