How does ARC impact email deliverability for DMARC-enforced domains, and what are the best practices for marketers?
Summary
What email marketers say8Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Email Geeks explains that ARC is designed to allow a DMARC protected message to be modified and still be accepted, but it requires deployment on each MTA in the forwarding chain and trust relationships between MTA operators. It is not currently widely deployed enough to guarantee delivery of broken DMARC messages.
Email marketer from Postmark notes that to maximize deliverability, senders should adopt best practices such as sending relevant content, segmenting email lists, and honoring unsubscribe requests, in addition to implementing authentication methods like ARC, DKIM and SPF.
Email marketer from SparkPost shares that monitoring DMARC and ARC reports is crucial for identifying deliverability issues and ensuring that emails are properly authenticated. These reports can provide insights into potential problems with forwarding or third-party senders.
Email marketer from Titan explains that while ARC can help, it is not a silver bullet for deliverability issues. Marketers should focus on building a good sender reputation, sending relevant content, and properly authenticating their emails.
Email marketer from SendGrid explains that maintaining a good sender reputation is essential for email deliverability. This includes sending high-quality content, avoiding spam traps, and properly authenticating emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Email marketer from Validity shares that marketers can benefit from ARC by ensuring their emails are properly authenticated and that any legitimate forwarding does not negatively impact their deliverability. Monitoring ARC reports can also help identify issues in the email delivery chain.
Email marketer from EasyDMARC shares that best practices include implementing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly, monitoring DMARC reports, and ensuring that any third-party senders are properly configured. ARC can then help improve deliverability for legitimate forwarding scenarios.
Email marketer from Mailjet shares that ARC improves deliverability by allowing legitimate intermediaries to forward emails without breaking DMARC authentication. Senders benefit from better deliverability, especially when their emails are handled by mailing lists or forwarding services.
What the experts say6Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks shares that if you send from a DMARC enforcing domain and your authentication is broken en route, your mail won't get delivered and there's no magic bullet to fix that other than not using DMARC. The DMARC best practices to reduce the fraction of your mail that arrives with broken authentication are monitoring, gradual ramp up, authoritarian mailstream management across the whole enterprise, sending every mail not only in a way that's syntactically correct, but which is robust against semanticless content rewriting.
Expert from Spamresource explains that ARC addresses the problem of DMARC failures when emails are forwarded. It allows forwarders to sign the email with their ARC signature, vouching for the authenticity of the original sender and the legitimacy of the forwarding process.
Expert from Email Geeks states that as an email marketer, you can't rely on ARC to save you from bad decisions and its primary reason to exist is to kinda fix discussion mailing lists.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that ARC's biggest benefit is that messages can survive re-mailing from list servers. The improved authentication from ARC can help improve delivery rates and place messages in the inbox instead of the junk folder.
Expert from Email Geeks explains if ARC is rolled out widely it's possible that it'll have some small reduction on DMARC failures in junk mail, but avoiding those is still going to be dominated by senders being exquisitely careful about how they send mail.
Expert from Email Geeks states that if you're authenticating every email you send with both DKIM and SPF, and you're not doing anything too silly in your message composition then the impact DMARC has on your mail is probably pretty minimal - but you still need to monitor reports to make sure that's the case.
What the documentation says3Technical articles
Documentation from Red Sift explains that ARC acts as a 'seal of approval' for emails, preserving authentication results as they pass through different email systems. This helps mailbox providers make more informed decisions about whether to deliver the email.
Documentation from DMARC.org explains that proper deployment of ARC involves ensuring that all intermediaries in the email chain support ARC and that the ARC signatures are correctly validated. This requires coordination between senders, intermediaries, and receivers to establish a chain of trust.
Documentation from ietf.org explains that ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) is designed to preserve authentication results across multiple intermediaries, which can improve deliverability for forwarded emails from DMARC-enforced domains. ARC helps receivers make better DMARC decisions by validating the chain of custody.