DMARC reporting: Enhancing visibility into email environments

The Sendmarc Portal provides useful insights into your organization’s email security through Domain-based Message Authentication, Conformance, and Reporting (DMARC). This guide will discuss configuring DMARC, navigating the dashboard, accessing detailed reports, and setting up automated reports to enhance your company’s email security management.

Policy settings

After verification, configure the domain’s DMARC policy:

DMARC policy

Options are p=none (allow all emails), p=quarantine (mark suspicious emails), and p=reject (block unauthenticated emails).

We recommend beginning with a policy of p=none and moving to p=quarantine and p=reject once your organization’s confident that this change won’t impact email delivery. Use the DMARC data to guide this decision-making.

Subdomain policy

Define how emails from subdomains are handled, allowing them to either copy the main domain’s policy or have their own.

In general, we recommend that this policy remains unchanged (and should also be set to p=reject as soon as possible). If your company has subdomains that require their own DMARC policies, rather create individual DMARC records for them.

Policy percentage

Set the percentage of emails to which the DMARC policy will apply. This tag will be phased out soon, so it’s best not to depend too heavily on it during DMARC implementation.

DMARC reports

Aggregate (RUA) reports

Aggregate reports are summaries that provide insights into the emails associated with your business’s domain, detailing the number of emails sent, sending domains, and authentication statuses and identifying potential issues.

Automated reporting is managed under the “Aggregate Report Settings” in the domain management settings. Here, your organization can set intervals for receiving reports (most providers only send reports once a day – so think of this as a requested interval instead of an instruction) and add additional recipients (receivers generally only send reports to the first two RUA addresses).

Forensic (RUF) reports

Generated for individual emails that fail DMARC validation, these reports contain information such as email headers and body content, which is useful for troubleshooting specific issues. Reports can be accessed through various dashboard overviews, including Failure Reports.

Your company can enable or disable these reports, and if enabled, specify recipients and define conditions under which these reports should be triggered.

Alignment settings

Determine the strictness of email source alignment with the domain’s policies using ‘Strict’ and ‘Relaxed’ modes for both DKIM and SPF.

We recommend using ‘Relaxed’ as it will allow enough flexibility to deliver most kinds of email.

Navigating the Sendmarc dashboard

Sendmarc’s dashboard offers a comprehensive overview of email security across all domains in your oranization’s account, featuring key metrics.

Quick insight cards

Detailed breakdown cards

Specialized dashboards

Sendmarc’s specialized dashboards can be found when navigating to the email sources overview. Here, you’ll find the:

The Sendmarc platform provides powerful monitoring and managing capabilities, with real-time updates and graphical representations that assist in making informed decisions effectively. Ready to take control of your organization’s email security? Sign up for a free trial!