• by Jess Nelson , November 2, 2015

Yahoo expanded its Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance policy for ymail.com and rocketmail.com on Monday, following on the heels of Google's expansion of Gmail's DMARC policies in June 2016. The technology could help avoid frantic communications from call centers as a result of spoofing and hacking attempts, especially during the holidays.

DMARC is an authentication standard for email that helps reduce spam and detect email spoofing by validating an email sender. "The primary purpose of DMARC was to provide a level of authentication in email that wasn’t around at the dawn of the Internet," says Bryan Jardine, vice president of U.S. operations and product management at security company Easy Solutions.

Previously, there was no way for an email provider or a consumer to know exactly where an email was coming from. With no authentication system, hackers could easily pose as a family member or company CEO to access email accounts to target financial records or other private information.  

By June 2016, Gmail will reject any email message that doesn’t pass DMARC authentication checks. As the larger email provider in the world with more than 900 million active users, this will clearly eventually affect email marketers in some capacity.

Gmail is not the only provider to implement DMARC. Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL have all implemented DMARC authentication systems to a certain degree.

Jardine says that many organizations have been slow to adopt DMARC implementation, but Google’s new strict policy means that email marketers can no longer continue to ignore it.

"DMARC is not going away and we’ll see a growing acceleration," he says.  

Some implementations are easy, only requiring a few lines of code. Marketers with many clients who haven’t adopted DMARC on their email servers yet, however, may experience a more challenging transition process to support and manage the new DMARC reporting systems.  

Jardine believes that most larger institutions will likely expand their IT departments to implement DMARC because they will see benefits, but says it may be more cost-efficient for smaller teams to hire a third party to implement and manage DMARC on their servers. 

The initial investment of implementing DMARC will pay off exponentially for email marketers in the long run, per Jardine, because "when you launch a campaign, you can ensure it gets delivered and delivered in an inbox, not spam folder."

In addition to higher inbox placement rates, DMARC validation systems also provide email marketers with aggregated data sets that can improve the ROI of email campaigns by providing better analytics and fraud protection.

DMARC also aims to provide a better customer experience, especially as the industry move into the holiday season. DMARC will verify emails are sent by real people and restrict hacking attempts.