AOL Adopts New DMARC Policy


Today, AOL announced that they, too, have adopted a "p=reject" DMARC policy. The same considerations previously mentioned as applying to Yahoo Mail users now apply to AOL users as well.

In today's AOL postmaster blog post, Vishwanath Subramanian offers some solid advice on how to deal with this change:
In almost all cases, we recommend that you switch to sending mail from your own domain. You may also consider using AOL SMTP directly. 
For mailing lists, also known as listservs, we recommend configuring reply behavior to fill the From line with the mailing list's address rather the sender's and put the actual user / sender address into the Reply-To: line. Please also note that current "auto unsubscribe" logic based upon bounces might be too rigid until this change has been in place for a while. 
For website operators with 'share from email' functionality, please consider using an email address from your own domain as the From address and populate the Reply-To: line with the address of the person sharing.
Solid advice. Especially the guidance about mailing lists; it roughly mirrors my prior advice.

Beats the heck out of competing advice that said "just kick all the Yahoo users to the curb" when Yahoo implemented this change. If I were walking that line, I'd now have to kick out all AOL users. And then maybe Hotmail and Gmail users, too, if and when those other two big webmail providers followed suit.
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