Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is extremely helpful in protecting your domain against phishing and spoofing. By extension, it helps protect your domain reputation by ensuring that you (and only you) are allowed to send emails using your domain name when fully implemented.
In this way, DMARC helps you build and protect a good domain reputation, which will help you with deliverability and inbox placement. DMARC alone is not the magic flag that guarantees inbox placement, but if you’re a good sender and doing good things with email, DMARC helps you protect against damage to your domain’s reputation caused by third parties.
DMARC Keeps Bad Actors Away
When sending bad email, botnet spammers, malware spreaders, and other bad guys rotate through addresses, spoofing their way through domains they don’t own, hoping to get lucky. They hope to find poorly protected ones that might have a good reputation. They hope that will give them a little bit of headway to get some of their bad email delivered—until they sour that domain’s reputation, then they move on to the next poorly protected domain.
A properly implemented restrictive DMARC policy (think p=reject) makes your domains less appetizing and less valuable for those bad guys. Your door is clearly locked, so the burglars looking to steal your domain reputation skip you and move on to the next house.
DMARC Is Just the Start
DMARC is important to domain reputation, but it’s not the only thing the inbox providers are looking at. Indeed, Google summarized it well when announcing their 2024 sender requirement updates.
- Authenticate email with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and DMARC.
- Allow for easy unsubscribe.
- Send wanted email.
Authentication is so very important — maybe that’s why it’s listed first. As an essential first step for deliverability success, email authentication allows the inbox provider to know that email from a domain really is from the domain it purports to be from.
Allowing for easy unsubscribe means that the email you send must have headers that support one-click unsubscribe. This is typically implemented by your email sending platform or marketing automation—it is not usually something individual marketers need to take any special steps to implement. But just to be safe, make sure you ask your email-sending platform to confirm that they’ve taken care of this.
And then, there’s (what I think of as) the big one: Send wanted mail. All three of these requirements are very important, but this is ultimately the final arbiter of whether or not the email you send will get delivered to the inbox. Inbox providers are really good at figuring out whether or not email is wanted. They can tell who interacts with which senders in the inbox and when email is mainly ignored or otherwise spurned.
Sending unwanted email through poor targeting, list purchasing, or otherwise missing the mark with regard to what email recipients are expecting from you will make all of those other technical successes moot. Spam folders are absolutely full of technically compliant but unwanted email messages.
While DMARC isn’t the only governor when it comes to building a good reputation for your email sending domain, it’s still an essential component of that deliverability equation.
Utilize DMARC to Boost Your Reputation and Deliverability
Here at Valimail, we’re building the future of trusted email inboxes. We can help you on our DMARC journey so you can get that boost in deliverability. With Valimail Enforce, our customers have seen up to a 10% increase in deliverability thanks to a better sending reputation.
Want to learn how our DMARC experts can help you?
Al Iverson is Valimail’s Industry Research and Community Engagement Lead, bringing over 25 years of experience in email marketing, technology, and deliverability. He’s committed to helping people learn more about DMARC and adopt it beyond just the minimum requirements while also helping good people send email and get their mail delivered.