Summary
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) reports are invaluable for understanding your email ecosystem and protecting your domain from spoofing and phishing attacks. While standard DMARC reports provide aggregate (RUA) and forensic (RUF) data, they primarily focus on IP addresses and authentication outcomes. This can leave a gap when trying to pinpoint exactly who or what within an organization is originating unauthorized emails. The challenge lies in enriching this IP-centric data with user-level insights, offering a more granular view for better domain enforcement.
Key findings
- Data limitations: Standard DMARC RUA and RUF reports offer IP-level visibility into email sending, which is crucial for identifying unauthorized sending sources, but they lack direct user or departmental identifiers. This makes it challenging to attribute email activity to specific internal users.
- Granular insights: Enriching DMARC data with user-level information provides a significantly more granular view, allowing organizations to pinpoint specific individuals, teams, or applications that are either correctly sending emails or inadvertently causing DMARC failures.
- Enforcement precision: This enhanced visibility aids in enforcing DMARC policies with greater precision, reducing false positives and accelerating the transition to stricter policies like p=quarantine or p=reject, by clearly identifying all legitimate sending sources.
- Data sources: User-level data can be sourced from various entities including Email Service Providers (ESPs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and specialized data partners. The combination of these sources is often necessary for comprehensive coverage.
Key considerations
- Technical complexity: Collecting, correlating, and presenting user-level data alongside DMARC reports requires sophisticated infrastructure and considerable effort, often involving integrations with multiple data streams.
- Privacy implications: Handling user-level data introduces significant privacy considerations. Organizations must ensure compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR or CCPA when processing and storing such information.
- Scalability challenges: For domains with high email volumes or numerous sending sources, the sheer amount of data to process and enrich can pose significant scalability challenges for any DMARC reporting solution. As noted by Sendmarc, automated data processing is crucial for maximizing DMARC reporting efficiency.
- Terminology clarity: New concepts or DMARC extensions that introduce new layers of data enrichment should use precise terminology to avoid confusion with established networking or protocol definitions.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often find themselves in a challenging position when it comes to DMARC. While they understand its importance for deliverability and brand protection, the raw, technical nature of DMARC reports can be daunting. Their primary concern revolves around identifying which specific email campaigns, platforms, or even individual senders within their domain are contributing to DMARC failures or unauthorized sending. User-level data promises to bridge this gap, offering a clearer picture that aligns with their operational needs.
Key opinions
- Actionable insights: Marketers frequently express a need for DMARC reports that offer more than just IP addresses. They desire actionable insights that directly tie back to their marketing efforts or specific email-sending tools.
- Troubleshooting focus: The ability to link DMARC failures to a particular user or campaign is highly valued for efficient troubleshooting. Without this, resolving issues can be a slow, manual process of deduction.
- Simplifying complexity: Many marketers find raw DMARC data overly technical. User-level enrichment could simplify the interpretation, making it more accessible and useful for non-technical teams, supporting broader DMARC implementation adoption.
- Optimization potential: With user-level data, marketers can better optimize their sending practices, ensuring that all legitimate email streams are correctly authenticated and reducing the risk of emails being blocked or sent to spam.
Key considerations
- Integration hurdles: Marketers rely on various ESPs and internal systems. Integrating user data from these disparate sources into a unified DMARC reporting view presents a significant technical and logistical challenge.
- Data accuracy: The accuracy of user-level data is paramount. Inaccurate attribution could lead to incorrect conclusions and misguided efforts to fix DMARC issues or enforce policies.
- Cost vs. benefit: Implementing a system for user-level DMARC data enrichment can be costly and resource-intensive. Marketers must weigh these investments against the tangible benefits of improved deliverability and security, as part of their broader email deliverability monitoring strategy.
- Privacy compliance: Any system that collects and links user-level data must rigorously adhere to global privacy regulations. This can complicate data collection and storage, but it is a non-negotiable requirement. Cloudflare's experience in building DMARC management solutions highlights the architectural considerations for secure data handling.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests that marketers need a simpler way to understand DMARC reports. They often struggle to connect raw IP data from DMARC to specific email campaigns or sending platforms used by their teams. This makes it hard to identify the root cause of deliverability issues.The current DMARC reporting format, while technically robust, lacks the contextual information that marketing teams require to take action. Insights that directly link failures to user activity would be far more beneficial.
Marketer view
Marketer from a Reddit forum emphasizes that understanding DMARC at a user level would greatly assist in internal education. It's difficult to explain to different departments why their emails are failing DMARC when the reports only show IP addresses.Providing specific user-level data could enable clearer conversations and faster adoption of correct email sending practices across the organization, improving overall compliance.
What the experts say
From the perspective of email deliverability experts, DMARC is a fundamental pillar of email security and authentication. However, they also acknowledge the inherent limitations of standard DMARC reports when it comes to pinpointing the exact origin within an organization, especially concerning user-level activity. Enriching these reports with more granular data presents a promising, albeit complex, avenue for enhanced domain enforcement and a deeper understanding of email traffic flows.
Key opinions
- Data value: Experts agree that while DMARC provides crucial domain-level visibility, the lack of user-level data in its standard reports limits the precision of enforcement actions. User-level data would add significant value for complex domains.
- Technical feasibility: Collecting and integrating user-specific data with DMARC reports is a substantial engineering challenge, requiring a robust data network that aggregates information from various sources like ESPs, ISPs, and other data partners.
- Enhanced security: The ability to attribute DMARC failures or unauthorized sending to specific internal users significantly improves an organization's security posture, allowing for faster incident response and better control over email channels.
- RFC compliance: It's critical to distinguish between standard DMARC (as defined by RFCs) and any proprietary extensions. While extensions can add value, they must be clearly identified to avoid confusion about the core protocol.
Key considerations
- Data source validity: A key challenge lies in confirming the reliability and origin of user-level data. It's important to understand if data is pulled from the reporter's metadata or the source IP, as this impacts its security implications and accuracy.
- Privacy and consent: Gathering user-level data must be done with strict adherence to privacy laws and user consent. This often involves contractual agreements with ESPs and ISPs to share such granular information.
- Avoiding misinterpretation: The term layer 2 can be misleading given its specific meaning in networking. Clear, accurate terminology is essential when describing DMARC extensions to avoid confusion among technical audiences.
- Existing solutions: For complex or high-volume domains, many DMARC reporting providers already offer advanced analytics beyond basic RUA/RUF, helping to identify unrecognized sending sources. While these might not be user-level, they provide significant detail for troubleshooting DMARC failures. Postmastery notes that ISPs send XML files with pass/fail information, forming the basis of these reports.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks explains that the DMARC extension they are creating is designed to go beyond traditional DMARC reports. It aims to track how individuals send email through a domain's various ESPs, providing a clearer picture than just IP addresses.This enriched data helps complex domains achieve DMARC enforcement by pinpointing which users are originating mail from specific service providers, thus facilitating more precise policy application.
Expert view
Deliverability expert from Spamresource suggests that the future of DMARC reporting will likely involve deeper data insights. While standard reports are good for compliance, operational teams need more context to effectively manage a complex email ecosystem.The challenge lies in securely and reliably integrating disparate data sources to provide a unified view without compromising privacy or introducing new vulnerabilities.
What the documentation says
Official DMARC documentation and related RFCs (Request for Comments) lay the groundwork for DMARC's operation, including its reporting mechanisms. These specifications detail the structure of Aggregate (RUA) and Forensic (RUF) reports, emphasizing IP addresses, authentication results (SPF and DKIM), and policy application. Critically, these foundational documents do not include provisions for user-level data. This implies that any user-level enrichment is an additional layer built upon, rather than inherent to, the core DMARC protocol.
Key findings
- Report content: DMARC Aggregate Reports (RUA) provide an XML-formatted summary of messages attempting to use a domain, including the source IP address, the number of messages from that IP, and the SPF and DKIM authentication results.
- Core focus: The primary intent of DMARC reporting, as defined in RFC 7489, is to give domain owners insight into how their domain is being used for email, particularly for identifying and mitigating unauthorized sending from unknown IPs. This includes details on DMARC tags and their meanings.
- No user ID: Neither RUA nor Forensic (RUF) reports inherently include specific user identities or internal organizational attributes beyond IP addresses and domain information. RUF reports, while more detailed, typically contain header information that might indirectly reveal a user in certain cases, but it's not a standardized field.
- Extension model: Any capability to enrich DMARC reports with user-level data represents an extension or enhancement built on top of the existing DMARC specification, requiring additional data collection and correlation mechanisms.
Key considerations
- Protocol adherence: While extensions can be beneficial, maintaining adherence to the core DMARC protocol (e.g., DMARC, SPF, and DKIM standards) is crucial for interoperability and broad adoption among email systems worldwide.
- Data aggregation: Achieving user-level data enrichment typically involves integrating DMARC report data with internal logs, ESP data, and other sources, which requires robust data processing and correlation capabilities outside the DMARC protocol itself.
- Security and privacy: The collection and use of user-level data, especially in forensic reports, can raise significant privacy concerns. Implementations must carefully consider data minimization and secure handling practices in line with relevant regulations.
- Sender responsibility: The documentation implies that primary responsibility for identifying internal sending sources rests with the domain owner. DMARC provides the mechanism to identify unauthorized external use, but internal attribution requires additional tools and processes.
Technical article
DMARC.org Documentation confirms that the purpose of DMARC is to monitor and protect domains from unauthorized use by third parties. It provides a reporting mechanism (RUA) that details email authentication results (SPF, DKIM) and alignment status for emails claiming to be from the reporting domain, based on source IP addresses.This foundational layer focuses on cryptographic authentication and domain identity, rather than internal user activity.
Technical article
RFC 7489, which defines DMARC, specifies that the Aggregate Report (RUA) includes the IP address of the sending system, the number of messages, and the results of SPF and DKIM authentication. There is no field designated for individual user identities within the standard report format.This design reflects DMARC's role as a domain-level policy enforcement mechanism, rather than an internal auditing tool for specific users.
Related resources
3 resources
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Why your emails fail: expert guide to improve email deliverability [2025]
