DMARC is a protocol that helps prevent email spoofing and phishing. The goal of the DMARC system is to help recipients determine if an email purporting to be from your domain was sent by you or not. This post will go over what is DMARC and how to read a DMARC report and what it can tell you about your DNS information for your website so that you can correct any problems.

What is DMARC?

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an innovative technical standard that helps protect email senders from spam. DMARC allows organizations to publish policies for their own authentication practices as well as providing instructions on how these should be enforced with receiving servers. You can know more about DMARC with this DMARC FAQ.

What is a DMARC Report?

DMARC is a system that provides visibility into your email channels so you can be aware of what’s going on in the background. It also protects against BEC attacks, domain impersonation and fraud – all without having to implement an expensive security solution yourself.

A DMARC report provides a reporting mechanism for domain owners, in which they can read the authentication results of every email sent on behalf of their domains and take appropriate action against malicious sources. It also helps resolve protocol errors promptly so that deliverability does not suffer as well.

There are two types of DMARC Reports:

• DMARC aggregate report
• DMARC forensic report

DMARC aggregate report: Emails sent from your domain are automatically authorized with SPF and DKIM authentication. You can monitor the status of these 2 mechanisms by checking aggregate reports, which includes information about where each origination point in this process originates as well as if it has been successfully validated or not according to policy requirements.

DMARC forensic report: Forensic reports are received every time an email from your domain fails both SPF & DKIM. These detailed analysis on emails that have been spoofed, since they contain information like which address was used to send them as well as the subject line and sometimes even headers! It’s recommended to enable these after analyzing aggregate data but only receiving legitimate ones before it gets too crowded with false positives (spam).

Why Do You Need DMARC Reports?

The DMARC Report is a crucial tool for ensuring that messages are correctly delivered and the sender’s identity goes untainted. When DKIM or SPF fail, it helps to have another set of eyes on your email traffic so as not to lose any important data in transit – this can be especially helpful when collaborating with other organizations who aren’t familiarized with how these services work.

DMARC is an email authentication program that ensures your messages are delivered to only the inbox they were intended for. It does so by checking against SPF or DKIM records, and if these fail then DMARC can be used in order to prevent phishing attacks on valuable data like addresses etc.. In order to keep communications reliable you need highly secure emails which also improve deliverability rates because people will open what they expect from the sender’s domain name.

When you publish a DMARC record in your DNS, it allows for the specification of how emails should be treated when they fail DKIM and SPF authentication. By setting up these reports from our outbound mail traffic you can get valuable information that may be used as evidence against any phony sources trying to send us junk mail or phishing schemes by authenticating genuine ones with proper settings set on their records.

How to Read a DMARC Report?

Your DMARC reports are the most important part of combating future phishing attacks. They provide essential data to help protect you against these cyberthreats and they’re usually sent by email with a subject, “DMARC Report.” You can have two types of DMARC reports: RUA (Aggregate DMARC reports) or RUF(Forensic DMARC reports).

Reports are usually sent once a day by email to the address you specify. If reports with rua DMARC record tag exist in your domain, every server that receives mail from it sends out these kinds of notifications as well – this way if there’s any correspondence going on about unrecognized emails or other problems receiving messages then someone would know right away.

The reports are in XML format, and include report metadata. The important information about your domain can be found by looking at the DMARC status of messages that passed through it.

Each of the records show:

• The messages sent from an IP address for the time period of the report
• The results of SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the messages
• Actions taken by the receiving server

If you want to see a raw XML format DMARC report and a DMARC report in tabular format, click here.

To Conclude

DMARC reports are a critical tool that can help you identify and correct any discrepancies in your website’s DNS information. Correcting these errors after you read DMARC reports will ensure that all of the emails sent from your domain to customers reach their destination, increasing customer satisfaction with your business. We hope this was useful for how to read a DMARC Report.