DMARC vs DMARCbis

What DMARCbis changed, and whether it changes your record

RFC 9989 replaced RFC 7489 on 20 May 2026, and RFC 9091 with it. Nothing you published stopped working — but three tags stopped doing anything, three new ones appeared, and the way a record is found changed entirely.

Almost nobody has moved yet

We read 49 live DMARC records on 6 September 2026, Turkish and global. All 49 use only the old tag set. Not one uses np, psd or t. 26 still carry pct — and not a single one sets it below 100, which means removing pct changes nobody’s policy in practice. The migration is smaller than it sounds.

The tags

TagDMARCRFC 7489DMARCbisRFC 9989
pworksworks
spworksworks
npnot thereworks
tnot thereworks
psdnot thereworks
adkimworksworks
aspfworksworks
ruaworksworks
rufworksworks
foworksworks
pctworksnot there
rfworksnot there
riworksnot there

How the record is found

DMARCRFC 7489

Two lookups: the author domain, then the organisational domain worked out from the Public Suffix List — a file maintained outside DNS that every mail server has to ship and keep updated. Everything between the two is skipped.

DMARCbisRFC 9989

No list at all. The receiver climbs the name one label at a time, asking DNS at each step and stopping at the first record — so a policy published halfway up is found instead of skipped. §4.10

Check your own domain