What is the difference between 'ruf' and 'rua' DMARC tags?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 20 Apr 2025
Updated 26 Oct 2025
7 min read
When you implement DMARC, one of its most powerful features is the ability to receive reports about your email traffic. These reports are crucial for understanding who is sending email on behalf of your domain, identifying potential abuse, and ultimately improving your email deliverability. The DMARC record itself contains tags that specify where these reports should be sent. The two primary reporting tags are rua for aggregate reports and ruf for forensic (or failure) reports. While both offer insights, they serve very different purposes and carry distinct implications.
Understanding the distinction between these two report types is fundamental to effectively managing your DMARC policy and securing your email ecosystem. Many organizations, especially those new to DMARC, often wonder which reports they should focus on or if both are necessary. The reality is that rua reports are almost universally adopted, while ruf reports are far less common due to significant privacy concerns. This guide will clarify the roles of each tag and their importance in your email security strategy.
A comprehensive DMARC monitoring platform like Suped helps you make sense of these reports, providing actionable recommendations to strengthen your email authentication. By analyzing the data from these reports, you can gain clarity into your email channels and ensure your legitimate emails reach their intended recipients.
Understanding RUA reports (aggregate reports)
The rua tag, short for report URI for aggregate reports, specifies the email address where receiving mail servers should send daily aggregate reports. These reports provide a high-level overview of all email traffic observed by the reporting domain claiming to be from your domain. They are sent in an XML format and contain invaluable data for DMARC implementation and ongoing monitoring.
Aggregate reports (RUA) summarize the authentication results (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment status) for all emails sent using your domain. They do not contain sensitive information like email content or sender/recipient addresses, making them privacy-friendly. Instead, they focus on statistical data, such as the volume of emails, the IP addresses of the sending servers, the DMARC policy applied, and the percentage of emails that passed or failed authentication. This data is critical for understanding your email ecosystem and identifying unauthorized senders. You can learn more about what information is contained in DMARC RUA and RUF reports.
Importance of RUA reports
RUA reports are the backbone of any successful DMARC deployment. They provide the necessary visibility to:
Identify all legitimate sending sources using your domain.
Monitor DMARC compliance for your email traffic.
Detect unauthorized senders and potential spoofing attempts.
Track the progress of your DMARC policy transition.
Platforms like Suped parse these complex XML reports into an easily digestible format, allowing you to visualize your email authentication status and make informed decisions.
A DMARC record utilizing the rua tag would look something like this:
The ruf tag, which stands for report URI for forensic reports, is designed to provide detailed information about individual email messages that fail DMARC authentication. Unlike aggregate reports, forensic reports aim to give a more granular view of what went wrong, often including message headers and potentially even redacted portions of the email body. This level of detail is intended to help domain owners investigate the source and nature of email spoofing and phishing attempts.
While ruf reports sound useful in theory, their practical implementation is fraught with challenges, primarily due to privacy concerns. Because these reports can contain sensitive information from failed emails, many mail receivers (like Gmail and Yahoo) either do not send them at all or send them in a heavily redacted or censored format. This makes them less reliable and often less useful for actual forensic analysis. You can find more detail on what the 'ruf' DMARC tag stands for.
An example DMARC record with both rua and ruf tags might look like this:
The fundamental difference between rua and ruf boils down to the type of information they provide and the associated privacy implications. RUA reports offer aggregated, high-level summaries that are perfect for macro-level analysis of email flow and authentication trends. They are safe, widely adopted, and essential for any DMARC journey. RUF reports, on the other hand, promise detailed forensic data for individual failures but are rarely fully delivered due to privacy concerns. As such, it's generally recommended to prioritize rua reports for DMARC monitoring. Are DMARC RUA and RUF tags mandatory, and what are their benefits?
RUA: Aggregate reports
Data content: XML-formatted summary of email traffic, volume, authentication results (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), and sending IP addresses.
Purpose: Provides an overview of email channels, identifies legitimate senders, and helps track DMARC policy enforcement. Crucial for understanding your email landscape.
Privacy: Contains no sensitive personal information or email content. Generally considered safe.
Adoption: Widely supported and sent by most major email providers, including Gmail and Outlook.
RUF: Forensic reports
Data content: Intended to include individual message headers and potentially redacted body content of failed emails.
Purpose: Designed for detailed forensic analysis of spoofing and phishing attacks.
Privacy: High risk of exposing sensitive information, leading to privacy concerns and legal issues.
While rua is a cornerstone of DMARC reporting, ruf reports have largely fallen out of favor. The potential for exposing sensitive data from failed emails, even if unintended, presents a significant compliance and privacy risk. Many email service providers (ESPs) have chosen to either not support ruf reports or to heavily redact them, making them practically useless for their intended forensic purpose. This is a critical factor to consider when configuring your DMARC record and policy examples.
Privacy concerns with RUF reports
The primary reason for the limited adoption of ruf reports is the inherent privacy risk. If an email fails DMARC authentication, the ruf report could contain portions of the original message, which might include:
Personal data of the sender or recipient.
Confidential business information within the email body.
Proprietary content or intellectual property.
Collecting such information, even for security purposes, can create legal and ethical dilemmas, especially with regulations like GDPR. For this reason, most organizations rely heavily on rua reports and other security measures to combat email abuse. You can explore a more detailed comparison of RUA and RUF reports on Skysnag.
Leveraging DMARC reporting for security and deliverability
Even with the decline of ruf reports, the data provided by rua aggregate reports remains incredibly valuable. By carefully analyzing these reports, organizations can proactively identify misconfigurations in their SPF and DKIM records, uncover shadow IT sending email on their behalf, and move their DMARC policy towards quarantine or reject. This progression helps protect your domain from impersonation and improves the trust recipients have in your brand's emails.
A robust DMARC monitoring solution is essential for this process. Suped offers a unified platform that simplifies the complexities of DMARC, SPF, and DKIM. We provide AI-powered recommendations that tell you exactly what actions to take to fix issues, strengthen your policy, and safely transition your DMARC policy to quarantine or reject. Our real-time alerts ensure you are immediately aware of any critical changes or potential threats to your email deliverability.
With Suped, you don't just get data, you get actionable insights. Our platform helps you to not only gather DMARC reports but also interpret them effectively, ensuring that your email authentication is correctly configured and continuously optimized. This proactive approach is key to maintaining a strong sender reputation and ensuring your emails consistently reach the inbox.
The reports that matter most for DMARC
In summary, while DMARC offers two types of reporting tags, rua and ruf, the aggregate reports (RUA) are by far the most critical and widely adopted. They provide the necessary visibility without the privacy risks associated with forensic reports (RUF). By focusing on rua reports and using a robust DMARC monitoring solution like Suped, organizations can effectively secure their domains, protect their brand reputation, and ensure high email deliverability. This strategic approach to DMARC ensures your email communication remains both secure and effective.
Gmail and 
Outlook.
