The original DMARC specification was published back in March 2015 as RFC 7489 and had a status of “Informational”. A new revision published in May 2026 breaks the specification into multiple RFCs and has a status of “Proposed standard”. This is the first step to becoming an Internet Standard.
The new DMARC RFCs:
- RFC 9989 - core protocol specification
- RFC 9990 - aggregate reporting specification
- RFC 9991 - failure reporting specification
In the approximately ten years between these two revisions the specification has been refined but not radically altered. The updated specification is fully backward compatible with the previous one.
None of the changes matter unless you are implementing DMARC. The new specification will have no impact on deliverability or email program performance.