Microsoft is the latest provider to implement stricter email security measures, joining Google, Yahoo and Xtra. These changes aim to combat email spoofing, phishing, and spam, ensuring a safer digital communication environment.
If your email recipients are using hotmail.com, live.com, or outlook.com domains and your school is sending more than 5,000 emails per day to those services, from May 2025 you must comply with new email authentication protocols to ensure your emails reach your parents, caregivers, and whānau. What this means for your school:
- Taking action now will help ensure important messages, such as newsletters, continue to reach your community without being flagged as spam.
- You must audit your DNS records to ensure they include valid SPF, DKIM, and DMARC entries.
- These changes will also impact N4L’s Mail Relay service, so if you haven’t yet, please verify your email set-up.
We recommend you share this information with your school’s IT support team or IT provider. For detailed guidance on the changes and how to ensure you’re compliant, see this Microsoft support page or the Ministry’s website here, while our Support Hub article has details on the Mail Relay settings.