What it is: All email domains have policies that determine if incoming messages should be accepted (delivered) or rejected (not delivered). DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is one of these policies. If an email’s authentication fails in certain cases, DMARC takes effect.
What it does: Prevents phishing, spoofing, and delivery of fraudulent emails. There are cases where DMARC policies mistakenly identify legitimate email marketing as fraudulent and reject them.
DMARC and Free Email
The DMARC policy for these free email providers may still tell receiving servers to reject your campaign because it wasn’t sent through them.
For example, let’s say you send a Robly campaign with a From email address like yourname@yahoo.com. The campaign appears to be sent from a yahoo.com domain, but it’s actually sent from Robly’s servers. Yahoo’s strict DMARC policy doesn’t like this. Their DMARC policy tells your subscribers’ receiving servers to automatically reject anything that looks like it comes from yahoo.com, but comes from somewhere else instead.
Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL have strict DMARC policies. This means that if and when you use a Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL address as your campaign’s From email address, you may experience delivery problems.
If your campaign is affected by these policies, you’ll see a warning on the Settings and Test & Send steps of the Campaign Builder.
This is what you will see if you choose to use a free email provider in Robly, as a warning:
The Best Solution
The best way to improve your deliverability is to use a From and Reply-to email address using a domain owned by you or your business, like yourname@yourcompanyname.com.
However, if you use a free email address to send, we will automatically add @send-robly.com to your free email address to help avoid issues. This process is in place for Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Live email addresses.
Register a Domain
To avoid the consequences of DMARC policy changes of free email providers, use an address at your own domain. If you don’t have an email domain to use as the From email address for Robly campaigns, you can register one.
Register a Domain
About DMARC at Registered Domains
If you experience a large number of bounces at your domain, or a domain owned by your organization, check your DMARC policy to see if it’s strict or relaxed. It’s possible your DMARC policy is set up to tell receiving servers to reject emails that fail SPF or DKIM authentication.
When you register your own domain, you may be able to avoid certain delivery problems by updating your DMARC policy to tell receiving servers to accept emails sent through other servers on behalf of your domain, even if they fail SPF or DKIM authentication. A relaxed DMARC policy also helps ensure that your subscribers will receive emails like signup or unsubscribe confirmations. The DMARC update process varies by hosting service, so contact your hosting provider or IT department to help set it up.
White Labeling
To avoid delivery issues and make your campaigns appear to come from your servers instead of Robly’s, you can white label with us. At Robly, this option is called Branding and you can set this up in your account. Click here for more info.