What Is DMARC?

Why do you need DMARC?

DMARC is a relatively new method for assisting with deliverability for email marketing. It’s being implemented worldwide and many organisations are using this to help them in their defence against the ever rising tide of emails with questionable content or intent. Pure360 are working on Best Practice guides and we recognise that as a legitimate sender of email, you want to make sure you stand the best chance to be in your recipients’ inboxes. DMARC helps you achieve this.

DMARC is a process to check DKIM and SPF records, already previously created on your sub-domain or domain, and based on results received, make a judgement about what to do with the email received.

What does the DMARC record do?

Let’s look at the record we’re suggesting you set up. Let’s assume (as per our Domain Masking guide) that you’re masking the news.xyz.com domain yourself

Breaking this down, the Value string contains information on what to do with the received email. Here’s what each part means:

• v=DMARC1 – Use Version 1 of DMARC standards, currently the only version

• p=none – the policy in place for this domain – one of the following:
  Quarantine – drop this into a store for future examination
  Reject – don’t accept email from this sender address
  None – don’t take any action – let it get to the email inbox if the recipient’s domain accepts it

• rua/ruf=dmarcreporting@pure360.com – send the reports of aggregated campaigns/forensic failures to Pure360

• fo=1 – send the emails mentioned above if any authentication attempt fails

In simple terms, Pure360 will monitor all the sends for any failures to deliver and take steps to ensure that this does not get repeated.

If you have difficulty setting up this DNS entry please contact your account manager.