Muhammad Basim
Email Marketing

How to Read DMARC Reports Without a Paid Tool

By Muhammad Basim·
How to Read DMARC Reports Without a Paid Tool

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FAQ FIELD CONTENT

Paste into the mb_faq repeater, one pair per row.

Q1: What is a DMARC aggregate report?
A1: A daily summary a mailbox provider sends covering every message they received claiming to be from your domain. It lists sending IP addresses, message counts, and whether SPF and DKIM passed and aligned. It contains no message content.

Q2: Why am I getting DMARC failures from my own domain?
A2: Usually alignment rather than authentication — your platform is signing as itself instead of as you. The other common cause is forwarding, which breaks SPF by design. The third possibility is a sending source you had forgotten about.

Q3: Are DMARC analyzers worth it?
A3: Free tiers are sufficient for most senders and save real time over reading XML. Paid tiers earn their cost when you have many sending sources, multiple domains, a need for historical trend data, or want alerting.


SOURCE NOTES

Not for publication.

Claim Source
Reports arrive as zipped XML; analyzer vs raw options The Email Deliverability Playbook, Ch. 26
Three categories found in first reports The Email Deliverability Playbook, Ch. 26
Postmaster authentication near 100%; partial pass means an unconfigured tool The Email Deliverability Playbook, Ch. 26
10-minute weekly read sequence The Email Deliverability Playbook, Ch. 26
Postmaster Pass / Needs Work verdict, spam rate under 0.1% The Email Deliverability Playbook, Ch. 2 and Ch. 26
Aggregate report field structure RFC 7489 / DMARCbis aggregate report format

JSON-LD Schema

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        { "@type": "HowToStep", "name": "Decide raw XML or analyzer", "text": "Point your rua address at a free analyzer tier for a dashboard, or unzip and read the XML directly." },
        { "@type": "HowToStep", "name": "Read the records section", "text": "For each source check source_ip, count, disposition, policy_evaluated alignment results, and auth_results raw pass/fail." },
        { "@type": "HowToStep", "name": "Sort sources into three piles", "text": "Your ESP passing, forgotten legitimate senders failing, and unrecognised IPs failing. Authenticate or retire the second group." },
        { "@type": "HowToStep", "name": "Run the weekly ten-minute review", "text": "Check Postmaster compliance status, spam rate, and authentication rate, then your ESP bounce and complaint rates, then look for new sources in reports." }
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