Recently, Microsoft announced that it will follow Google and Yahoo and require bulk senders to comply with email authentication standards such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. The company will start enforcing these requirements across its domains on May 5, 2025, by routing non-compliant mail directly to the junk folder.
These standards are nothing new and have long been considered a best practice, but having the three largest mailbox providers all agree on one thing speaks to the importance of securing your domain with authentication! These large mailbox providers are asking everyone to do this important work in order to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent senders. Preventing the bad stuff from making it to the inbox will help to preserve email as a useful tool for years to come.
Domains impacted by this decision include:
msn.com
outlook.com
hotmail.com
live.com
What to do next?
If you are a Constant Contact customer, don’t worry — we’ve got you covered. We offer a lot of options to ensure your mail gets delivered. The best option, if you are sending from your own domain, is to make sure you’ve got self-authentication set up! Don’t have your own domain to authenticate with? That’s ok, we now offer the ability for you to set up your own custom subdomain within our product.
But I’m not a bulk sender
While Microsoft, Yahoo, and Gmail have all stated that anyone sending more than 5,000 emails a day is a bulk sender, we know they will have a difficult time tracking that number, as your email may come from multiple sources. We also believe that these authentication requirements are good for senders of all sizes, so we’ve made it easy to do within our platform. Visit our Community Email Delivery Success Hub or our KnowledgeBase for more information!
