How do email forwarding and DMARC policies affect email delivery and reporting?

Email marketer from SparkPost shares that monitoring DMARC reports is crucial for identifying and addressing email delivery issues caused by forwarding. Regularly reviewing these reports allows senders to adjust their authentication practices and DMARC policies to minimize the impact on legitimate email traffic.

Email marketer from Validity explains that understanding and managing email forwarding is crucial for maintaining good email deliverability with DMARC. Techniques like SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) can help mitigate the impact of forwarding on DMARC authentication and ensure that legitimate forwarded emails are still delivered.

Email marketer from Email Hippo explains that SPF flattening can help improve email deliverability and mitigate issues with forwarding. By reducing the number of DNS lookups, SPF flattening helps ensure that SPF authentication passes, even when emails are forwarded.

Email marketer from Reddit user u/EmailGuru42 shares that if you have a strict DMARC policy (p=reject), forwarded emails that fail authentication will be rejected by the recipient's mail server. Implement SRS or advise users against forwarding if maintaining a strict DMARC policy is critical.

Email marketer from Postmark shares that a DMARC policy is required to implement BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification), and enforcing DMARC can improve email delivery and brand recognition. When forwarding breaks DMARC, it can impact BIMI display, as the email might not pass authentication checks.

Email marketer from EasyDMARC shares that DMARC reporting provides valuable insights into email authentication failures, including those caused by forwarding. Analyzing these reports helps senders identify legitimate forwarding scenarios that are breaking authentication and adjust their DMARC policies accordingly to minimize delivery issues.

Email marketer from ReturnPath explains that implementing strong email authentication protocols, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, is essential for protecting your domain from spoofing and ensuring that legitimate emails are delivered. Proper configuration and monitoring of these protocols can help mitigate the negative impact of forwarding on email delivery.

Email marketer from SocketLabs shares that the DMARC policy (none, quarantine, reject) dictates how receiving mail servers should handle emails that fail authentication. A 'reject' policy will prevent delivery, while 'quarantine' may send the email to the spam folder. Monitoring DMARC reports can reveal if legitimate emails are being impacted by the policy.

Email marketer from Mailjet shares that email forwarding can break DMARC authentication, especially if the forwarder modifies the message headers or body. When this happens, the forwarded email may fail DMARC checks at the recipient's mail server, potentially leading to delivery issues depending on the DMARC policy in place.

Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum, user TechEmailExpert, explains that DMARC can significantly impact mailing list deliverability because the mailing list server forwards the email, causing it to fail DMARC if the original sender's domain is protected. List owners often need to implement SRS or other workarounds to maintain deliverability.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that if your IP address appears in a DMARC report, it likely indicates that you are not authenticating your emails correctly. If the authentication were broken in transit, the report would show the IP address of the forwarder or intermediate mail server.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that DMARC reports provide information about emails received with your domain in the From: address that weren't authenticated by you, and forwarding is a common cause of broken authentication, leading to forwarded emails appearing in DMARC reports.

Expert from Word to the Wise shares that achieving full DMARC enforcement (p=reject) can be challenging due to legitimate email forwarding and other scenarios that break authentication. Careful monitoring and adjustments are necessary to avoid blocking wanted emails.

Expert from SpamResource explains that when an email is forwarded, the SPF record check will likely fail because the forwarding server's IP address will not match the original sender's SPF record. This failure can cause delivery issues, especially if the recipient's mail server strictly enforces SPF.

Expert from Email Geeks answers that p=none has almost no effect on mail delivery and is primarily for receiving DMARC reports. Switching to p=quarantine or p=reject would prevent the delivery of emails currently appearing in the reports.

Expert from Email Geeks shares that having DMARC-aligned authentication, where the 822.From, 821.From, and DKIM d= are all in the same domain, is aspirational and not causing immediate problems if not implemented.

Documentation from RFC 7489 explains that DMARC aggregate reports provide a summary of DMARC authentication results for emails claiming to be from your domain. These reports include information about SPF and DKIM failures, which can be caused by forwarding, and help domain owners understand how their emails are being handled by different mail receivers.

Documentation from DMARC.org explains that DMARC policies (p=quarantine or p=reject) instruct recipient mail servers on how to handle messages that fail DMARC authentication. These policies can directly impact email delivery, with 'quarantine' potentially sending messages to spam and 'reject' preventing delivery altogether. A policy of 'none' does not affect delivery.

Documentation from Google Workspace Admin Help explains that SPF (Sender Policy Framework) can be affected by email forwarding. When an email is forwarded, the original sender's SPF record might not match the forwarding server, causing SPF authentication to fail. This can impact deliverability, especially if the recipient's mail server strictly enforces SPF.

Documentation from Microsoft explains that Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) is a mechanism used to rewrite the sender address of forwarded emails so that they pass SPF authentication. Exchange Online supports SRS to improve deliverability when emails are forwarded.