The End of ARC: What the IETF's Move to Retire RFC 8617 Means for Your Forwarded Mail

Sun, 31 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

On April 22, 2026, the IETF DMARC working group published draft-ietf-dmarc-arc-to-historic-00, calling for RFC 8617 to be reclassified as a Historic standard. The working group had been rechartered less than a week earlier, on April 16, 2026, with a specific mandate to produce a status-change document for ARC by November 2026.

The experiment that was ARC is, in the IETF’s formal language, over.

That matters to anyone running a DMARC policy at p=quarantine or p=reject. ARC was the mechanism that was supposed to keep legitimate forwarded mail from breaking when it hit your enforcement policy. Understanding what is being retired, why it did not work, and what is coming next tells you exactly what you need to do today.

Ietf on Daily DMARC News

The End of ARC: What the IETF's Move to Retire RFC 8617 Means for Your Forwarded Mail