Our new white paper covers MDaemon's layered defense strategy, enterprise-grade security features, and why it's a compelling alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365.
2026 Update: Enforcement has tightened considerably since this post first went written. Starting in November 2025, Google began ramping up enforcement on non-compliant bulk mail, and failing messages can now see temporary or permanent SMTP rejections rather than just being routed to spam. Microsoft has also joined Google and Yahoo, enforcing its own SPF, DKIM, and DMARC requirements for Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, and Live.com senders since May 5, 2025. And the DMARC standard itself has changed: in May 2026, the IETF officially published DMARCbis, an update to the DMARC specification that adds a few new record tags and retires a few old ones. We've updated the guidance below to reflect all of this.
As cyber threats evolve, we face growing email security challenges. Hackers and cyber criminals relentlessly continue to attack businesses as users continue to fall for email scams. That’s why we must continue to be aware of the best practices for securing our email.
For hackers, it's a numbers game. An estimated 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent every day, but all they need is for one of them to find a willing victim and do damage to your network.
And in 2026, the odds have shifted further in the attacker's favor. Generative AI now writes the majority of phishing emails, producing fluent, personalized, typo-free messages that are far harder to spot than the clumsy scams of a few years ago. Research shows AI-crafted phishing lures achieve dramatically higher click rates than traditional ones, while costing attackers almost nothing to produce at scale.
Needless to say, leaving email security up to end users is probably not a good idea.
