What’s Happening

From about November 6 to November 9, some email sent to Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live addresses bounced with a message saying it lacked SPF, DKIM or DMARC records. Many business owners, and some email companies, assumed Microsoft had quietly started requiring DMARC from every sender.

Microsoft’s own incident report (EX1545193) says that’s not what happened. Microsoft says a recent update to its spam enforcement rules wrongly marked and blocked legitimate mail. The incident is listed as restored, with impact ending November 9 at 11:02 UTC.

Why It Matters

Most business owners never think about email authentication. They think about customers, invoices, appointments and newsletters. But email is the backbone of a small business, and when it fails you often don’t see it fail.

Mail that Outlook.com refused was not retried, so the person on the other end never knew it was sent. If an invoice, a quote or a reply bounced last week, send it again.

What It Means For Austin

Austin is full of Black-owned, Latino-owned and family-owned businesses, side hustlers, creators and nonprofits. A roofing company sending quotes, a realtor sending contracts, a church sending its newsletter: many of them use a custom domain and have never heard the word DMARC.

There’s no new requirement for small senders. Bulk senders, meaning high-volume senders, still do need to authenticate their mail. Adding a basic DMARC record is cheap and a good first step.