Apr 28, 2014 By Al Iverson

AOL and Yahoo Both Publish Restrictive DMARC Records

in Marketing, Email Marketing, Best Practices

On April 22, AOL announced that they are now publishing a "p=reject" DMARC policy. Yahoo had already implemented a similar policy as of April 7th.

What does this mean for ExactTarget Marketing Cloud clients?

You CANNOT use the aol.com domain (or other AOL domains) in a from address.
You CANNOT use the yahoo.com domain (or other Yahoo domains) in a from address.

If you do use an aol.com or yahoo.com from address when sending from the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud email platform, that mail will be rejected by Gmail, Hotmail, Comcast, Yahoo, and many other ISPs. It will result in a higher-than-average bounce rate, and this means that recipients at many ISPs will not be able to receive those messages.

Also, you should not use any freemail/webmail email addresses as the from address when sending from the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud email platform. Where Yahoo and AOL lead, we believe others will follow. Thus, if you want to make sure you aren't going to run into problems in the future, you should proactively ensure that you aren't using any domain in a from address other than your own.

Click here to learn more about chosing the right from address.