Updates to Microsoft sender requirements

Recently, Microsoft announced that they are rolling out changes to help reduce the amount of spam their users receive. This change is a positive development and one in which Zendesk is aligned. You may experience delays or rejections in outbound sending since these changes include requirements related to rate limits, as well as DNS checks to verify the health of your records. Zendesk is always actively monitoring the health of our infrastructure to provide the greatest deliverability possible.

These changes by Microsoft adhere more closely to the RFC standards, specifically SPF and DKIM. These are standards that Zendesk also abides by and supports with our product.

Reviewing the health of your Zendesk instance and your domain

Due to the changes introduced by Microsoft, accounts may want to review the health of their Zendesk instance, specifically the Support addresses section on the Email page in Admin Center and the Custom Domain for DKIM setup.

System support addresses (support@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com) utilize both SPF and DKIM to ensure that they meet sending requirements. The traffic sent from these addresses is authenticated by our own authority with both of these protocols.

When we are sending traffic on behalf of an account’s domain (support@yourdomain.com):

Accounts are encouraged to add an SPF record for their external support addresses. In addition, we encourage customers to examine the health of their own domain’s SPF record (EasyDMARC, EmailStuff, and Kitterman are helpful tools). If you see errors in any of these verification services, address them with your domain admin or email provider.

Enabling DKIM is highly encouraged (after adding the required DNS records). This adds an additional layer of validation to an account’s outbound email traffic. Please do not enable this feature without first adding the required DNS/cname records.

Add a DMARC record for your domain. This is done entirely outside of Zendesk and may require the assistance of your domain admin or email provider.

Other considerations for improving the health of your email traffic

Remove sales and marketing links from your agent signatures or from within your triggers, automations, or HTML template. These may be regarded more severely by Microsoft (as well as other recipients, such as Gmail and Yahoo), and may make your transactional support traffic appear to be part of an uninvited sales or marketing attempt.

Consider removing @outlook.com addresses for email archiving or replacing them with an address designed to handle increased traffic loads. Microsoft is instituting rate limits. Free email accounts are not designed for commercial archiving purposes.

Examine your email workflows. In general, if a user hasn't emailed you first, then the receipt of an automated message can seem like uninvited traffic, particularly to any free email provider.

Summary

Although Zendesk has no control over the behavior or acceptance policies of any external service or resource, it's common for these services to implement changes to more closely adhere to RFC standards. Zendesk monitors updates and changes to these policies to ensure the highest levels of deliverability and encourages our customers to utilize healthy sending practices, which is a partnership between:

What we do as an email sender

The DNS records that exist for your domain

The acceptance policies in place at the receiving service

While these new requirements from Microsoft align with policies many email servers have been using for quite some time, accounts that have not adopted SPF/DKIM/DMARC or those with invalid records will want to consider leveraging these authentication protocols to your advantage.

Getting assistance

If you have any questions about your domain’s DNS records or the health of your domain, refer them to your domain admin or email provider. Zendesk cannot investigate or troubleshoot these issues, as they fall outside our scope of support.

If you have questions about email that is specific to your Zendesk account, contact Zendesk Customer Support. If you have product feedback or feature requests related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback.