No DMARC record found: Fix this critical email security gap

No DMARC protection is a serious risk

The risk is best understood from an attacker’s point of view. If there’s no DMARC record for a domain, it’s significantly easier to:

• Use that domain in the visible “From” field
• Send emails that look like they’re from your company
• Exploit trust in your brand to get credentials or payments

The downstream impact shows up across security, deliverability, and even governance.

Spoofing and phishing become easier

Without DMARC, there’s no alignment check between the visible “From” domain and the domains used for SPF and DKIM.

Employees and customers rarely inspect headers. They see your domain in the “From” field, a familiar logo in the body, and a message that appears to relate to invoices, payroll, deliveries, or password resets.

BEC and payment fraud risk increases

BEC often relies on spoofed identities and domains. A common tactic is a fake email from the CEO or CFO instructing urgent payment to a new bank account.

If there’s no DMARC protection on your primary domain, an attacker can send as that domain. Even if other controls exist, the lack of DMARC greatly increases the odds of those emails being accepted and believed.

Deliverability and sender reputation suffer

Mailbox providers increasingly expect domains to have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured. While they may still accept your messages without DMARC, authentication gaps can:

• Make it harder to maintain a strong sender reputation
• Lead to more of your legitimate messages landing in Spam or Junk folders

From a marketing perspective, no DMARC protection is at odds with good deliverability practices.

You lose visibility into how your domain is used

One of DMARC’s biggest advantages is reporting. When you publish a record with an rua and optionally a ruf tag, receivers send you:

• Aggregate reports (RUA) showing which IPs and services send as your domain, and whether they pass or fail checks
• Failure reports (RUF) that give you deeper insight into individual emails that failed DMARC authentication

Without DMARC, you don’t get these. You have no central view of who’s sending as your domain, where authentication is failing, or whether someone’s actively trying to spoof you.

This lack of visibility makes it harder to comply with email authentication requirements and respond to incidents quickly.

Compliance and governance gaps widen

Many security frameworks, cyber insurance providers, and governments now ask specifically about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. If your key domains return “no DMARC record found”, you’re exposed to:

• Failed audits and security assessments
• Additional scrutiny from customers and regulators
• Questions about why a basic anti-spoofing control is missing

In other words, the absence of DMARC becomes a governance risk as well as a technical one. It signals that your domains can be abused.

Taken together, these risks are why “no DMARC record found” should never be the end state for any important domain. The next step is turning that error into a concrete plan: Putting SPF and DKIM foundations in place, publishing a DMARC record, and tightening policy safely.

How to fix “no DMARC record found” in three steps

Fixing “no DMARC record found” isn’t just a one-line DNS change.

To avoid creating new DMARC issues, it’s best to approach the process in three steps:

1. Make sure SPF and DKIM are in place and correctly configured
2. Publish an initial DMARC record in monitoring mode
3. Use DMARC data to identify legitimate and unauthorized senders

Step 1: Confirm SPF and DKIM foundations

Start with an inventory of systems that send email using your domain. For most organizations, this includes:

• Core mail platform (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or similar)
• CRM or sales engagement tools
• Marketing platforms
• Billing, invoicing, or ERP systems
• Customer support and ticketing tools

Once you have the list, review SPF and DKIM for each.

For SPF, ensure that your TXT record includes all legitimate sending services and remains within the ten DNS lookup limit. Remove references to systems you’ve retired. Decide whether -all is appropriate, or whether you need ~all while discovery is ongoing.

For DKIM, enable signing on your sending servers. Publish the TXT records under selector._domainkey.yourdomain.com and confirm via a DKIM record checker tool that DKIM is correctly configured.

At this stage, you’re only making sure that the underlying authentication mechanisms are in place and working. This greatly reduces the risk of unintended DMARC failures later.

Step 2: Publish a monitoring-only DMARC record

When SPF and DKIM exist for your senders, you can safely publish a DMARC record. This removes the no DMARC record found error and allows you to begin generating reports.

A typical starting record looks like this:

This single TXT record must live at _dmarc.yourdomain.com. The p=none policy instructs receivers to deliver email normally, regardless of whether DMARC passes or fails, but to send you aggregate and failure reports.

Once DNS has propagated (typically within 48 hours), DMARC checker tools should stop reporting “no DMARC record found” and start showing your new policy. Shortly after that, you can expect to begin receiving aggregate reports from servers.

Step 3: Use DMARC data to close gaps

With DMARC reports flowing, focus on understanding and improving your authentication before you change the policy.

Keep an eye out for:

• Legitimate messages that fail DMARC because SPF or DKIM isn’t aligned
• Unknown or unexpected sources sending on behalf of your domain

When you see legitimate messages failing DMARC, update your SPF and DKIM configurations until reports show those messages passing. The goal is to reach a point where all authorized email passes DMARC, and only unwanted traffic fails.

Moving from monitoring to enforcement without breaking email

The most common mistake after fixing “no DMARC record found” is to jump straight from p=none to p=reject. This can cause legitimate emails to be rejected.

A staged approach keeps risks under control.

Stage 1: Stay at p=none until the data is stable

Remain at p=none while you work through the DMARC reports and make necessary corrections. It is usually better to spend a little extra time monitoring than to move quickly and cause delivery issues.

Stage 2: Introduce quarantine

When you are confident that most genuine traffic passes DMARC, change the policy to quarantine failing emails. For example:

Here, p=quarantine tells receivers to treat failing messages as suspicious and place them in Spam or Junk folders instead of the inbox.

Monitor the impact of quarantine on real traffic, especially critical flows like invoices, password resets, and customer notifications. If legitimate messages start landing in Spam or Junk, use DMARC reports to correct SPF or DKIM records, so those messages pass going forward.

Stage 3: Move to reject for full DMARC protection

Once DMARC reports show that legitimate mail passes consistently and remaining failures are from unauthorized sources, you can update your policy to p=reject:

At that point, receiving servers will reject messages that fail DMARC rather than delivering or quarantining them. This provides the strongest defense against domain spoofing, significantly reducing the opportunity for phishing and BEC attacks.