DMARC was widely deployed from the specification published as RFC 7489 in 2015. In 2026, the IETF published RFC 9989, the current standards-track DMARC specification.
For new technical work, RFC 9989 should be the primary normative reference. RFC 7489 remains useful when researching older implementations, documentation and deployment history.
Why this matters
Email documentation often lives for years. A page that simply says “DMARC is RFC 7489” can now send an engineer to an obsolete specification without explaining why so much existing material still cites it.