DMARC and Help Scout
DMARC is an email authentication standard that's used to help protect a domain from fraudulent email. A DMARC policy helps prevent spam or "spoof" emails that appear to be coming from your domain by instructing email servers how to handle email from your domain that does not pass checks for authenticity.
DMARC and Help Scout
You do not need a DMARC policy on your domain to be able to send email from Help Scout servers specifically, however, as of February 2024, Google and Yahoo email servers require that anyone who sends bulk email — like marketing emails, newsletters, or other mass emails — or sends more than 5000 emails a day to their servers has a DMARC record in place.
Read more about the Google and Yahoo requirements and Help Scout here: Google and Yahoo Email Authentication Requirements
Note: You cannot use Help Scout to send bulk email, but if you send bulk emails from anywhere, or send more than 5000 emails a day overall, you will need a DMARC record in place to send from Help Scout as well.
If you have a DMARC record in place or you will be setting one up, you want to make sure that you set up the CNAME records for DKIM on your domain for Help Scout to ensure that emails sent through our servers will pass those checks.
See Use DKIM to Help With Email Delivery for help on getting those records set up at your DNS provider.
Learn more about DMARC
DMARC is a domain setting that will affect all email sent from your domain from all services and providers you use. You will want to talk to your IT team or website administrator about how to create a DMARC record and what it should be.
If you'd like to learn more about DMARC, we'd recommend reading these resources:
- DMARC Academy
- State of DMARC Adoption by Inbox Providers via MxToolbox
- Why DMARC? via dmarcian
- What is DMARC? via Postmark
- DMARC Overview via dmarc.org
- DMARC: Monitor and secure your email delivery via Postmark
We'd also recommend using Postmark's DMARC tool to implement and monitor your DMARC setup. Make sure that you've got the CNAME records in place for Help Scout before you start this project!