DMARCbis
The IETF revision of DMARC published in May 2026 as RFC 9989, 9990 and 9991, which made DMARC a standards-track protocol and replaced RFC 7489.
What it means
DMARCbis was the working name of the revision. It split the protocol into three documents: RFC 9989 for the mechanism, RFC 9990 for aggregate reports and RFC 9991 for failure reports, together obsoleting RFC 7489 and the experimental RFC 9091.
The changes that matter to domain owners: the DNS tree walk replaces the public suffix list; pct, rf and ri become historic; the new t= tag handles testing; np= (policy for non-existent subdomains) and psd= join the standard; p= becomes recommended rather than required; and terms such as Monitoring Mode and Enforcement are defined.
Existing records keep working. Receivers will adopt the new behaviour over time, so expect a period where both versions are in use.
Related terms
On this site
Sources
What this definition rests on. The wording is ours; the facts are theirs.
- RFC 9989: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)rfc-editor.org
- RFC 9989: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), appendix Crfc-editor.org
- RFC 9990: DMARC Aggregate Reportingrfc-editor.org
- RFC 9991: DMARC Failure Reportingrfc-editor.org
- IANA: DMARC parameters registryiana.org
All 432 terms in the glossaryThe wiki: blocklists and bounce codes