On May 20th, 2026 the IETF’s RFC Editor published three documents that update the DMARC protocol, making the changes and enhancements previously referred to as “DMARCbis” official, and moving the updated DMARC protocol to the IETF’s Standards Track. This represents many years of work by the IETF’s DMARC Working Group, as development began in earnest […]
Summary of Changes in DMARCbis
The IETF’s DMARC Working Group has submitted documents to update the DMARC protocol to the RFC Editor. For reference, here is a high-level overview of the changes introduced in these updates: Informational ⇨ Standards Track Public Suffix List replaced by DNS Tree Walk and Public Suffix Domains (PSD) Several tags deprecated: pct=, rf=, ri= np= […]
DMARC Announced Ten Years Ago
On January 30th of 2012, fifteen organizations announced the working group they had formed, and the first version of the protocol they had produced. This was the public kickoff of both DMARC.org and the DMARC protocol. It would grow from just 450 published sending domain policies and 2 billion protected mailboxes after one year, to […]
Presentation from Third JPAAWG Meeting Available
The Japan Anti-Abuse Working Group (JPAAWG) held its third annual meeting virtually from Tokyo, Japan on November 11th and 12th, 2020. DMARC.org director Steve Jones was invited to provide a brief video update on DMARC adoption, and the slides from that presentation are now available for download. The update covers a a few highlights from […]
Presentation from Second JPAAWG Meeting Available
The Japan Anti-Abuse Working Group (JPAAWG) held its second annual meeting in Tokyo, Japan on November 14th and 15th, 2019. DMARC.org director Steve Jones was invited to give a general update on DMARC and related matters, and the slides from that presentation are now available for download (with notes). The update covers a number of areas, including two new publications from the […]
ARC Protocol Published as RFC 8617
The Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) was designed to address situations where email messages that are forwarded, and in some cases altered, will no longer pass email authentication checks. After spending 3 years as a work item in the IETF‘s DMARC Working Group, the specification was published as RFC 8617 (HTML, PDF, plain text) on July […]
Presentation from First JPAAWG Meeting Available
The Japan Anti-Abuse Working Group (JPAAWG) held its first meeting in Tokyo, Japan on November 8th, 2018. DMARC.org director Steve Jones was invited to give a general update on DMARC and related matters, and the slides from that presentation are now available for download. The update covers several areas of interest to people working to […]
Version 18 of ARC Specification Published
As first reported on the arc-spec.org website, on October 2nd the IETF’s DMARC Working Group published version 18 of the ARC specification document, incorporating the changes suggested during the Working Group Last Call (WGLC). There are many small language changes to clarify concepts or bring usage in line with other IETF documents, such as Email […]
Working Group Completes Last Call For ARC Specification
The DMARC Working Group has completed Last Call for the ARC specification. This means that when the final consensus changes are incorporated, the document will be submitted for approval and publication by the IETF. It is possible that the specification might be published before the next IETF meeting in November, though perhaps more likely between then […]
New ARC Implementations at IETF 99 Hackathon
An Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) table was organized at the weekend hackathon held before the IETF 99 meeting in Prague this week. ARC is an official work item of the IETF DMARC Working Group, and will be discussed during the working group meeting Thursday morning. Participants from two different vendors worked on new implementations of […]