DMARCbis Is Official: RFC 9989 Upgrades DMARC From Suggestion to Standard
In May 2026, the IETF quietly did something that email administrators have been waiting on for years: they published RFC 9989, RFC 9990, and RFC 9991 — collectively known as DMARCbis. These three documents replace RFC 7489, which has been the authoritative reference for DMARC since 2015. The headline change isn’t technical; it’s procedural. The original RFC 7489 was published as an Informational document, meaning it described what the industry was already doing, not what it was required to do. DMARCbis arrives as a Proposed Standard on the IETF Standards Track — the first formal step toward becoming an Internet Standard. In plain terms: DMARC just graduated from “strong industry recommendation” to “official protocol.” ...