Why am I getting DMARC and SPF errors when emails deliver fine?
Third-party email marketing services often fail basic SPF checks within DMARC reports because their sending IPs are not included in your domain's DNS records, even though inbox providers still manage to deliver the messages. This discrepancy leaves administrators guessing about real deliverability health and creates confusing tool warnings that hinder proper configuration.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Adding a subdomain as suggested by email marketing providers
- 2Relying on DKIM alignment to pass DMARC overall despite SPF alignment failure
- 3Using personal email accounts to contact external vendors, donors, and providers
- 4Scaling back email security and encryption tools
- 5Running domain diagnostics through tools like MX Toolbox, Unspam, and Google Postmaster Tools
- 6Restarting the computer
- 7Changing the AntiPhish policy to quarantine messages instead of rejecting them
- 8Setting up DMARC reporting in-house or with a service
- 9Checking SPF, DKIM, and DNS records
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“We experienced this recently and it came down to a DNS issue.”source ↗
“I'm having trouble setting up SPF for my domain. I use email marketing services, but I keep getting SPF errors when sending emails.”source ↗
“I'm not sure which service this IP is from. It's a Google IP address, but I don't know how to properly configure SPF for all the services I use”source ↗
“Meanwhile, Postmaster shows zero SPF-pass statistics – which is strange – 99% of emails arrive without any issues, even though we send a lot of emails.”source ↗
“Recently, many of our org's emails to providers, donors, and vendors have been blocked or rejected :/”source ↗
“As a result, some staff have been using their personal email with external contacts to complete time-sensitive work, which is not ideal.”source ↗
“Anyone experiencing IMAP connectivity issues to outlook? Getting this Logging in is disabled on this server: "A protocol-level access (such as IMAP or legacy authentication) has been turned off for your mailbox on the server side, or your account's credentials/license require an administrator fix" Randomly started happening, nothing changed.”source ↗
“In the last couple of weeks, we've had several emails getting come in with failed DMARC verification and get rejected.”source ↗
“In the past 2 weeks we've had 5 separate instances all from different companies.”source ↗
“Luckily, they told us we're not blacklisted, but in just doing a quick run through MX Toolbox, there's a slew of dmarc, spf, dns, mx, and smptp errors popping up”source ↗
“Outlook wasn’t behaving for me this morning… quick restart of pc and all resolved.”source ↗
“Exchange Online? We started noticing the same recently and had to change the AntiPhish Default policy to quarantine messages instead of rejecting them.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How to manage users who don't have separate email addresses
- 2Why is step-up authentication forced and buggy?
- 5Account deactivated for security reasons and stuck in ID verification loop
- 2How to stop bad emails from entering CRM workflows
- 2Can multiple Windows users open a KeePass database?
- 6Sync agent stops with Error 5 Access Denied after internet outage