warning
Why don’t ESPs warn you, when you’re putting your email together, when you’re about to send the test message, if DMARC is going to fail? It was perhaps considered optional in the past, but from 2024 onward, DMARC effectively becomes mandatory given Gmail and Yahoo’s new sender requirements. Thus, DMARC compliance (and success) has become more important than ever before. Which means that it’s time for sending platforms to start warning people, before somebody sends a big email campaign that’s going to fail DMARC. A big ole blinking “DMARC alert” warning, please and thank you! This is such a great idea that I am saddened that I didn’t think of it. All credit here goes to Big Jason Henderson, who posited that when trying to execute a test send, a warning should pop-up telling you if the send platform thinks a message is likely to fail DMARC, why that is
A friend warned me of a scenario that could have the potential to freak people out, if misunderstood. It looks like this:This person is using Spamhaus to filter inbound mail.They seem to be rejecting mail from Gmail due to a Spamhaus listing.The Spamhaus website DOES suggest there might be an SBL entry (a blocklisting) for Gmail.So…Spamhaus is blocking Gmail? NO, no no. Gmail is not blocklisted by Spamhaus. Promise. Here’s what’s actually happening.Using Spamhaus is good, but querying Spamhaus using open/public DNS resolvers is bad. Spamhaus is actually rejecting those queries — they’re not blocking mail from Gmail. The person running into this problem needs to switch over to using the Spamhaus DQS (Data Query Service), and that ought to just flat out fix things.As noted above, the rejections are actually because the email administrator of the mailbox provider or mail server in question has configured Spamhaus in a way