Thomas Hampel

 6 April 2025
These days a number of customers are reaching out to us due to Microsoft's announcement to make DMARC mandatory.
Customers are afraid of their mails getting lost because Domino does not provide native DMARC support yet.

For outbound mails, DMARC just describes what a recipient server should do with an email.
By using a DNS TXT record in YOUR DNS, the recipient is instructued to do: Nothing, Quarantine, or Reject an email from a sender that does not meet your SPF record and doesnt provide a DKIM signature.
Sounds easy (+is easy) for Domino customers to set up - details at the end of this post

How will Microsoft's announcement affect you?

Let's take a look at the facts first:

- Microsoft's announcement will affect CONSUMER domains (=hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com), but not other domains.
- Even after May 5th 2025, Microsoft will not reject your mails.
- Non compliant high volume senders (to consumer domains!) will find mails ending up in the junk folder of the recipient.
- A typical O365/Exchange Onprem customer using @YourDomain.com is not affected, for clarification see this official comment from Microsoft


This all is nothing new. Google also announced the same same, and it is in effect since February 1, 2024

Are you sending more than 5.000 mails PER DAY to @hotmail.com, @live.com, or @outlook.com or likewise for @gmail or @googlemail.com accounts?
Then you are a considered being a bulk sender!

Bulk messages often are marketing campaigns, targeting individuals only using generic MS or Google domains listed above. Essentially being B2C mailings.
You can still send mails to folks using those email domains. Just if your company sends more than 5.000 mails in a single day your mail might be put into the Junk folder if you have not added a DMARC record.
By the way, for marketing initiatives, mass mailings, etc, take a look at products like HCL Unica

However, if you want Domino to meet the DMARC requirements, all you have to do is to enable DMARC in DNS.
A prerequisite is having configured SPF and DKIM, both are standards Domino supports.

With those prerequisites being configured, enabling DMARC is quite simple.
For details see step by step instructions in this article and once done, run a DMARC check against your domain.

If you are looking for a Domino application to analyze DMARC Inbound reports, take a look at this template from NTF-Factory

As a side note:
Microsoft Exchange (onprem) does neither support DKIM nor DMARC - both would require 3rd party products (see this).

References:
- What is DMARC ?
- Ideas portal: DMARC Support for Domino
- Google's Announcement - effective Feb 1st 2024
- Microsoft's Announcement - effective May 5th 2025
- KB0103502 - Whitepaper: Understanding SMTP authentication and using DKIM and SPF

Thomas Hampel

 24 September 2024
Just a short revisit of a previous blog post which I wrote 7 years ago based on a friendly request from a customer.
mail-template-9.0.1-feature-pack-9-manage-return-receipts-according-to-rfc-2298.htm

The code below is almost the same. It is just now avoiding to introduce a new variable named 'doc' and it is put at the beginning of the event to also cover situations where the document is opened in preview mode.

According to RFC 2298 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2298.txt it is recommended to show a dialog box where the recipient of a mail can decide weather or not a return receipt shall be sent back to the originator of the mail.
This behavior is not currently part of the Standard HCL Mail template.

To add this feature you have to modify the following design elements:

- Form “Memo”, Event "QueryOpenDocument", added the code shown below
- Form “Reply”, Event "QueryOpenDocument", added the code shown below
- Form “Reply With History”, Event "QueryOpenDocument", added the code shown below

Insert this code at the BEGINNING of the QueryOpenDocument event.

If Source.isNewDoc Then
 '# don' t do anything, as this is a new document
Else
       If Source.document.GetItemValue("ReturnReceipt")(0) = "1"  And Source.document.HasItem ("DeliveredDate") Then
               If Messagebox ("The sender of this message has asked to be notified when you read this message." & Chr(13) & "Do you wish to notify the sender?", 36, "Send Return Receipt?") = 7 Then
                       Call Source.document.ReplaceItemValue ("ReturnReceipt", "0")
                       Call Source.document.Save(True, False, True)
               End If
       End If
End If


For clarity, this is what the QueryOpen event looks like BEFORE the modification:


and AFTER the modification it looks like this:

Thomas Hampel

 18 January 2018
Maybe you noticed but with Notes 9.0.1 FP9 you can (finally) run mail rules on existing messages (see SPR #BLIO8TGDUW )
You can use mail rules to run actions on mail already in mail folders. This feature existis within the FP9 mail template and is hidden by default.
To use it, your administrator must upgrade your mail file to the Feature Pack 9 template.

Then the owner of the mail file will then need to enable this feature by clicking on File > Preferences > Mail.
In Mail Options, select Enable Run Rules On Existing Mail.


References:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/fixlist.nsf/5c087391999d06e7852569280062619d/bb0745a647ada8f985258183005803d9?OpenDocument

Thomas Hampel

 19 September 2017
According to RFC 2298 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2298.txt it is recommended to show a dialog box where the recipient of a mail can decide weather or not a return receipt shall be sent back to the originator of the mail. This behavior is not currently part of the Standard IBM Mail template.

To add this feature you have to modify the following design elements:

• Form “Memo”, Event "QueryOpenDocument", added the code shown below
• Form “Reply”, Event "QueryOpenDocument", added the code shown below
• Form “ReplyWithHistory”, Event "QueryOpenDocument", added the code shown below

Insert this code at the end of the QueryOpenDocument event.

Set doc = Source.document
If Source.isNewDoc Then
        '# don' t do anything, as this is a new document
Else
        If doc.GetItemValue("ReturnReceipt")(0) = "1"  And doc.HasItem ("DeliveredDate") Then
                If MessageBox ("The sender of this message has asked to be notified when you read this message." & Chr(13) & "Do you wish to notify the sender?", 36, "Send Return Receipt?") = 7 Then
                        Call doc.ReplaceItemValue ("ReturnReceipt", "0")
                        Call doc.Save(True, False, true)
                End if
        End If
End If

Reference:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-BlockRetRec/index.html