Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a domain's authentication policy that tells receiving mail servers how to deal with an email failing to pass SPF or DKIM authentication. Based on the FROM domain's policy, the receiving server will either accept or reject the email.

DMARC policies are aimed to prevent non-legitimate emails, including phishing and spoofing. However, strong DMARC policies can sometimes misidentify legitimate emails as fraudulent when delivered via a third party. In this article, you will learn how DMARC may affect the delivery of your emails if you use a free email provider and what you can do to fix it.

DMARC and Free Email Providers

Some free email providers, like Yahoo and AOL, have implemented strong DMARC policies to prevent spam and spoofing. If you register for eEvidence with a Yahoo email address, Yahoo's DMARC policy will tell receiving servers that comply with DMARC that the email that we send on your behalf should be rejected because it wasn't sent through a Yahoo server.

There's no technical workaround to bypass a DMARC restriction when using an email address from a free provider. If the receiving server is rejecting your email because of a DMARC policy, it will continue to do so no matter what you try.

What can I do?

The simplest and quickest solution is to switch from Yahoo to another free email provider, but bear in mind that sooner or later all major email providers will likely implement DMARC. If you are using a free email provider DMARC may not be causing you any issues now, but the odds are it will.

To avoid the risk, we encourage you to switch your free email domain to a domain owned by you or your organization. This looks more professional and helps guarantee your emails delivery.

Alternatively, you can use your eevid.net virtual address to send emails and register emails. For instance, if your email address is name@example.com, you can use name@example.com.eevid.net as your sending address and have your emails registered in the normal way. To do so, you need to add the virtual address on your email client program as follows (for a better understanding, a name@yahoo.com fictitious address is used as an example):

• Email address: name@yahoo.com.eevid.net
• User name: name@yahoo.com
• Password: the same password you have configured when registering for eEvidence
• Outgoing SMTP server: smtp.mx.eevid.com
• Advanced settings: ports 25 and 465
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL): supported
• User authentication. For security reasons, you must identify yourself when sending emails through outgoing SMTP. When setting up the outgoing server configuration, make sure to turn on password authentication with the same user name and password as above. Account

Important notice. Bear in mind that your virtual address will be visible to recipients when using it to send your emails.

Thank you for asking!
eEvidence Support Team

Related to SPF Bounce Failed Postmaster DMARC DKIM DNS