DMARC - Rejection Emails
DMARC is an essential email authentication protocol designed to protect domains from spoofing and improve overall email deliverability. By working with SPF and DKIM, DMARC helps ensure that outgoing emails are verified and handled consistently by major email providers.
What is DMARC?
DMARC standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication using the well-known SPF and DKIM mechanisms. This means that senders will experience consistent authentication results for their messages at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and any other email receiver implementing DMARC.
How am I affected?
If you utilize a form on your website that has visitors send an email using a 'FROM' field in which they input their email addresses, there is a chance that the email will fail due to authentication if the @domain.com address is using DMARC. As of this writing, this only affects @yahoo.com addresses. However, this may change in the future.
Emails that are rejected due to the DMARC policy will normally indicate as much within the error itself. An example of an email rejected by Gmail can be seen below:
550-5.7.1 DMARC policy. Please contact the administrator of the yahoo.com domain if
550-5.7.1 was a legitimate mail. Please visit
550-5.7.1 Gmail SMTP errors and codes to learn about DMARC
550 5.7.1 initiative. sd1si21689276obb.46 - gsmtp.
What can I do to fix this?
We recommend updating the 'FROM' field within your form to use an email address of @example.com. Additionally, the 'REPLY-TO' setting can be used with any DMARC-compliant address and will successfully send emails without rejection, such as @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @gmail.com, or @aol.com.
An example can be seen in the following header:
$headers = 'From: [email protected]' . " " .
'Reply-To: [email protected]' . " " .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
Additional Resources
The following articles are for reference only. Please note that HostGator cannot offer direct support for the information provided below.