DMARC RUF Report Issues and Fixes

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DMARC Attestation Reports, commonly referred to as RUFs or Failure Reports, contain detailed information about emails that failed SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication checks. Senders can receive diagnostics of the reasons for these failures and discover how to resolve the issues in a timely manner.

RUF reports are the backbone of the email security and deliverability process, but they also have some associated issues and limitations. This guide will discuss these issues and explain how PowerDMARC supports addressing them with minimal effort.

Why DMARC is important for securing your email infrastructure
DMARC is an email authentication protocol that uses SPF and/or DKIM results as the albania phone number data primary source of action. It enables domain owners to take action on unauthenticated emails, providing significant benefits to all businesses. When implemented effectively, DMARC improves email deliverability. It prevents spammers from sending emails that falsely claim to be from a domain, thereby tarnishing the reputation of the domain.

Using DMARC Records In DMARC, a domain owner instructs the recipient's mail server how to handle emails that fail SPF and/or DKIM checks.

You can use one of the following DMARC policies:

No policy (p=none)
This is a permissive DMARC policy that is typically set up during the initial deployment phase to allow domain owners to monitor usage of their email systems. It does not provide protection against phishing, spoofing, or spam, as no action is taken on emails that fail authentication checks.

Isolation strategy (p=quarantine)
This is a more stringent policy that causes the recipient's mail server to place unauthorized mail in a quarantine folder.

Rejection policy (p=reject)
This is the strictest policy, under which the MTA rejects and drops illegal messages to provide the best protection against email-based cyberattacks.

Read here: Why companies need to take DMARC adoption seriously?

How do JIU reports work?
RUF has a title, attachment, URL, time the message was received, subject line, and verification result. The generation and sending process is as follows

Sends an email with a DMARC record and a "ruf" tag indicating the email the sender used to report verification failures.
If DMARC fails (due to SPF or DKIM inconsistencies), the ISP generates a forensic report containing message-level data, IP address, source, and sometimes the email body.
DMARC rarely sends the email body unless the client uses a PGP key in the DMARC analyzer. The user-uploaded public key causes the message to be encrypted.
Users can decrypt reports locally using the PGP decryption tool and password
The role of RUF reports in DMARC management
Email infrastructure becomes more complex with the involvement of third-party vendors. The existence and availability of RUF reports makes DMARC management easier as authors can be notified when a message fails to reach its intended destination.

You can leverage these well-diagnosed reports to highlight suspicious and disloyal entities that may be coming from within. This enables you to take quick remedial action to mitigate the impact, before your customers and prospects are at risk of being defrauded.