In April, Yahoo then AOL changed their DMARC policy to reject unauthenticated emails. That means a lot of legitimate emails are now blocked, never reaching their intended recipient. You’ll want to review all the third-party tools you use and update the email configuration to ensure that your important emails are delivered.
DMARC standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication using the well-known SPF and DKIM mechanisms. A DMARC policy allows a sender to indicate that their emails are protected by SPF and/or DKIM, and tells a receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes - such as junk or reject the message.
To ensure email deliverability, we recommend that you send emails from your own domain with proper authentication. That will fix the current challenges with deliverability to AOL and Yahoo. However can expect Gmail and others to follow, so consider this an investment in the long-term health of your business.
It’s pretty obvious that your primary email communication tool is your email service provider (ESP) like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Exact Target, etc. Most likely you’re already configured correctly to send authenticated emails (but you’ll want to check).
What’s not so obvious is that you’ll want to review how you are sending emails from third-party services. At Friendbuy, we use a lot of SaaS tools to run our business from customer support to invoicing. So we've been doing a thorough check of each tool that sends emails to customers and employees.
We made a checklist and thought you’d appreciate a 'to do' list to help you think through all the types of emails you are sending so that you can update those services you use to conform to DMARC standards.