Why can't I use a free email address as my username?

To help ensure your emails reach your recipients' inboxes, rezora restricts the use of free email addresses (like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and others) as the "from" address on your account (Account/Sending Address). For the best results, use your brokerage-provided email address, or a custom domain you or your company controls through a provider like GoDaddy or Squarespace. Here's why this matters.

The real issue: who controls the domain

When rezora sends email on your behalf, it needs to be authorized to do so. That authorization happens through DNS records, specifically SPF and DKIM, published on the sending domain, tied together by a DMARC policy that tells receiving mail servers what to do if those checks fail.

If you use a company or custom domain, you (or your IT team) control the DNS, so you can add records that explicitly authorize rezora's servers to send on your behalf. Free email providers don't offer that option. You don't own gmail.com, yahoo.com, or aol.com, so there's no way for you, or rezora, to add authorization records to those domains. That's the actual limitation. It's not that DMARC blocks outside servers in general (plenty of legitimate services send on behalf of company domains every day); it's that you can't authorize anything on a domain someone else owns.

This isn't new, and it isn't the same thing for every provider

It's worth clearing up the timeline, since it's easy to conflate a few different changes:

• Yahoo and AOL locked this down some time ago. Both providers published a strict DMARC "reject" policy on their own domains that year, meaning any email claiming to be from a yahoo.com or aol.com address gets rejected unless it actually comes from Yahoo's own servers. This famously broke mailing lists across the internet at the time, and it's the reason you've never been able to send bulk email "as" a Yahoo or AOL address through a third-party platform.

• Gmail tightened its own policy more recently, moving gmail.com from a passive monitoring policy to one that routes spoofed gmail.com mail to spam. This is a separate, narrower change than the item below, but it does mean Gmail's own anti-spoofing stance did shift around that date.

• Separately, Gmail and Yahoo also introduced new requirements for bulk senders, requiring anyone sending high volumes of mail to authenticate with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and to support one-click unsubscribe. This is about what senders need to do on their own domains, and it's a different mechanism from the free-email-spoofing issue above, even though both changes landed around the same time for Gmail.

The practical result of all this is the same either way: free email addresses can't be authenticated for use with a third-party platform like rezora, and that's been true for Yahoo and AOL specifically for about a decade.

What to do instead

Use your brokerage-provided email address if you have one. If you don't, a self-managed custom domain through a provider like GoDaddy or Squarespace works too, since it gives you (or your IT team) the DNS access needed to set up proper authentication for rezora. If you're not sure how to get this set up, check out our Authentication Set Up Guide here.