Aggregate reports provide daily, summarized data on all email authentication results (SPF and DKIM), the domain's DMARC policy, and how that policy is applied. By default, they're delivered to the address you specified in the rua tag every 24 hours.
This setup brings the biggest value to your company because you can routinely compare DMARC trends for issues and track compliance. A significant perk of collecting DMARC reports is that you'll be given information from all inboxes you sent mail to, which directly provides insight into how your email and your entire email system is performing. The reports also offer information about malicious actors that might be spoofing your domain and attempting to phish your customers. Aggregate reports provide critical details of your email environment and are definitely worth the investment so you can take action on the data.
How Do I Start Receiving DMARC Aggregate Reports?
To receive aggregate reports, follow these steps:
- Create DMARC record (e.g., _dmarc.yourdomain.com)
- Define report settings: Include the rua tag by adding
rua=mailto:your-email@example.com to the DMARC record's value. Replace your-email@example.com with the email address where you want to receive the reports.
- Publish record: It typically takes 24 hours to propagate.
- Monitor reports: Created in XML format (discussed more below).
How Often Are DMARC XML Reports Sent?
As mentioned, aggregate reports are daily summaries that are generated every 24 hours and delivered to the email address you chose in the rua tag during setup.
There's a caveat to these reports, though. DMARC aggregate reports are difficult to tackle on your own. If you try to decipher them by yourself, you'll likely become overwhelmed and frustrated quickly.
1. DMARC reports filling up your inbox
With DMARC set up to send reports to the address you specified, the number of reports you receive will vary by how much email you send. For many senders, this can quickly become overwhelming, to the point where the inbox is getting hundreds or even thousands of reports every day, an excessive amount of data to sift through. This process can be daunting, especially if you're the administrator responsible for interpreting the data and making required changes.
2. Issues deciphering report data from XML
Beyond the problem of the volume of reports that can inundate your business each day, once you open one of the reports in XML, you'll quickly notice it's difficult to make sense of it all. The DMARC aggregate reports you receive from various providers will all include XML (Extensible Markup Language). Unless you're privy to this form of coding, you'll need help reviewing and understanding the data sent. Each report contains one or more records, with each record containing SPF and DKIM authentication details and pass/fail statuses, along with an array of other details. To make sense of this, you'll need to tie all of those reports together before you can understand/take any action on the data. The below image is of a DMARC aggregate XML report:
As you can see in the example, XML reports aren't something most are familiar with. These XML reports are an aspect of DMARC that you'll likely need assistance to understand.
3. DMARC reports are not actionable until they are aggregated together
The biggest issue with these XML reports is taking action on the data they provide. Each taken separately, they don't offer a full enough picture of DMARC compliance and email delivery. When combined, problems will become identifiable and it'll be easier to understand where your DMARC compliance is.
So, How Do I Take Action?
To solve the DMARC aggregate report problem for businesses, MxToolbox has created two solutions:
Allow MxToolbox to Automatically Process Your Reports for You
We take email delivery and DMARC seriously, so we remove the three (3) barriers of getting actionable insight on your DMARC XML reports. We process and aggregate all of your reports for you to create a detailed look into where your email is being sent from/to, along with alerts and insights into problems that data is indicating.
Learn more about our DMARC solution
Use Our Free DMARC XML Report Analyzer Tool to Review Individual Reports
If you're not quite ready for MxToolbox to do the dirty work for you, we offer a free tool to upload XML files that builds a human readable/understandable report from the unreadable XML. Just know, you won't get the same insights and alerts with this route as if you allowed us to automatically process your reports.
XML Tool