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 the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- Most of it landed at once — the busiest month was September 2026, with 6 people.
- It is not one crowd: 8 people on Reddit and 1 on Stack Exchange ran into the same thing.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
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- 1Adding a subdomain as suggested by email marketing providersDid this help you?
- 2Relying on DKIM alignment to pass DMARC overall despite SPF alignment failureDid this help you?
- 3Using personal email accounts to contact external vendors, donors, and providersDid this help you?
- 4Scaling back email security and encryption toolsDid this help you?
- 5Running domain diagnostics through tools like MX Toolbox, Unspam, and Google Postmaster ToolsDid this help you?
- 6Restarting the computerDid this help you?
- 7Changing the AntiPhish policy to quarantine messages instead of rejecting themDid this help you?
- 8Setting up DMARC reporting in-house or with a serviceDid this help you?
- 9Checking SPF, DKIM, and DNS recordsDid this help you?
- 10Checking Service Health and logs to try to catch temporary failures before they vanish.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“We've recently seen a massive uptick in temp fails for SPF and DMARC policy. Unfortunately, this appears to happen with both allowed records and actual malicious spoofed emails.”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 ↗
“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 ↗
“The SPF/DMARC temp fails have been wild lately, I've got a client who's been screaming about it for the better part of a week.”source ↗
“We experienced this recently and it came down to a DNS issue.”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 ↗
“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 ↗
“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 ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 3Why does Outlook keep showing Access Denied or throwing errors?
- 4How to manage users who don't have separate email addresses
- 2Why is step-up authentication forced and buggy?
- 10Account 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?