Ask Al: Do Microsoft or Google ever ignore p=reject?

Here’s a question that comes up more often than you might think: If you publish a DMARC policy of p=reject, do the biggest mailbox providers actually reject the mail that fails? Or are Google and Microsoft letting failed mail through, maybe dropping it into a spam folder or placing it in quarantine instead?The short answer: No, Google and Microsoft are not ignoring your p=reject. Consumer Gmail and Outlook.com (what we used to call Hotmail) reject failing mail. Yup. And on the business side, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both reject failing mail by default, too.As usual, there’s some nuance. If you remember a time when Microsoft didn’t honor p=reject by default, you’re not imagining things. That did change at one point, a few years back. And business mail admins do have some say in how failed mail is handled within their own Workspace account or Microsoft 365 tenant. (In Microsoft world, for sure. In Google Workspace, I think so, but I'm less clear on how that bit of the G…

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