UPDATE: You need to authenticate with both DKIM and SPF. Google are circulating a new set of requirements for bulk senders on their blog. So are Yahoo. It’s almost like postmasters talk to each other or something. If you dig through the links in the Gmail blog post you can find this summary of what they’ll be requiring from bulk senders by February: Set up SPF or DKIM email...
Another day, another ESP telling a client to publish a SPF include for the wrong domain. It shouldn’t annoy me, really. It’s mostly harmless and it’s just an extra DNS look up for most companies. Heck, we followed Mailchimp’s advice and added their include to our bare root domain and it’s not really a huge deal for companies with only a couple SaaS providers. Still...
This is a followup from a post a few weeks ago about authentication changes at Office365. We have some more clarity on what is going on there. This is all best information we have right now. Microsoft is now requiring authentication to match the visible from address in order to reach the inbox at Office365. That means, either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain must align (in the DMARC sense) to...
Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec. The first is an extension of DMARC. They’re rolling out inbox flags for...
At the end of last year, Steve wrote a post about the different types of authentication. I thought I’d build on that and write about the costs associated with each type. While I know a lot of my readers are actually on the sending side, I’m also going to talk about the costs associated with the receiving side and a little bit about the costs for intermediaries such as CRM systems or...
Some notes on some of the different protocols used for authentication and authentication-adjacent things in email. Some of this is oral history, and some of it may be contradicted by later or more public historical revision. SPF Associates an email with a domain that takes responsibility for it. Originally Sender Permitted From, now Sender Policy Framework. It allows a domain owner to announce...
Many deliverability folks stopped recommending publishing SPF records for the 5322.from address to get delivery to Microsoft. I even remember Microsoft saying they were stopping doing SenderID style checking. A discussion on the emailgeeks slack channel has me rethinking that. It started out with one participant asking if other folks were seeing delivery improvement at MS if they added a SPF...
Multiple times over the last few weeks folks have posted a screenshot of Google Postmaster tools showing some percentage of mail failing DMARC. They then ask why DMARC is failing. Thanks to how DMARC was designed, they don’t need to ask anyone this, they have all the data they need to work this out themselves. The DMARC protocol contains a way to request reports when DMARC authentication...
DMARC is a protocol that makes it very, very simple to shoot yourself in the foot. Setup is tricky and if you don’t get it exactly right you risk creating deliverability problems. The vast majority of companies SHOULD NOT publish a DMARC policy with p=reject or p=quarantine for their existing domains. DMARC policy statements are, essentially, a way for a company to assert the following...
A question came up on the email geeks slack channel about empty from addresses. I asked if they meant the 5321 or 5322 from address which prompted a question about if you could even have a null 5321 from. Yes, you can and it’s commonly used for some types of email. 5321.from is the bounce address, and the domain used in SPF authentication. Null addresses, literally <>, are used for email...
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