If you are here reading this blog, chances are you have come across either of the three common prompts:
- No DMARC record
- No DMARC record found
- DMARC record is missing
- DMARC record not found
- No DMARC record published
- DMARC policy not enabled
- Unable to find DMARC record
Either way, this only implies that your domain is not configured with the most highly acclaimed and popularly used email authentication standard- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance or DMARC. Let’s take a look at what it is:
What is DMARC and why do you need email authentication for your domain?
In order to learn about how to fix the “No DMARC record found” issue, let’s learn what DMARC is all about. DMARC is the most widely used email authentication standard in the current time, which is designed to empower domain owners with the ability to specify to receiving servers how they should handle messages that fail SPF or DKIM or both. This in turn helps in protecting their domain from unauthorized access and email spoofing attacks. DMARC uses two popular standard authentication protocols, namely SPF and DKIM, to validate inbound and outbound messages from your domain. Let’s discuss them individually:
Sender Policy Framework
SPF is present in your DNS as a TXT record, displaying all the valid sources that are authorized to send emails from your domain. Every email that leaves your domain has an IP address that identifies your server and the email service provider used by your domain that is enlisted within your DNS as an SPF record. The receiver’s mail server validates the email against your SPF record to authenticate it and accordingly marks the email as SPF pass or fail.
DomainKeys Identified Mail
DKIM is a standard email authentication protocol that assigns a cryptographic signature, created using a private key, to validate emails in the receiving server, wherein the receiver can retrieve the public key from the sender’s DNS to authenticate the messages. Much like SPF, the DKIM public key also exists as a TXT record in the DNS of the domain owner.
Protect Your Business from Impersonation Attacks and Spoofing with DMARC
Did you know that email is the easiest way cybercriminals can abuse your brand name?
By using your domain and impersonating your brand, hackers can send malicious phishing emails to your own employees and customers. Since SMTP is not retrofitted with secure protocols against fake “From” fields, an attacker can forge email headers to send fraudulent emails from your domain. Not only will this compromise security in your organization, but it will seriously harm your brand reputation.
Email spoofing can lead to BEC (Business Email Compromise), loss of valuable company information, unauthorized access to confidential data, financial loss and reflect poorly on your brand’s image. Even after implementing SPF and DKIM for your domain, you cannot prevent cybercriminals from impersonating your domain. This is why you need an email authentication protocol like DMARC, which authenticates emails using both SPF and DKIM and specifies to receiving servers of your clients, employees, and partners how to respond if an email is from an unauthorized source and fails authentication checks. This gives you maximum protection against exact-domain attacks, and helps you be in complete control of your company’s domain.
Furthermore, with the help of an effective email authentication standard like DMARC, you can improve your email delivery rate, reach, and trust.
Adding The Missing DMARC Record for Your Domain
It can be annoying and confusing to come across prompts saying “Hostname returned a missing or invalid DMARC record” when checking for a domain’s DMARC record while using online tools.
For fixing the “No DMARC record found” issue for your domain all you need to do is add a DMARC record for your domain. Adding a DMARC record is essentially publishing a text (TXT) record in your domain’s DNS, in the _dmarc.example.com subdomain in compliance with DMARC specifications. A DMARC TXT Record in your DNS may look something like this:
v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:[email protected]
And Voila! You have successfully resolved the “No DMARC record found” prompt as your domain is now configured with DMARC authentication and contains a DMARC record.
But is this enough? The answer is no. Simply adding a DMARC TXT record to your DNS may resolve the missing DMARC prompt, but it is simply not enough to mitigate impersonation attacks and spoofing.
Implement DMARC the Right Way with PowerDMARC
PowerDMARC helps your organization achieve 100% DMARC Compliance by aligning both SPF and DKIM authentication standards, and helping you shift from monitoring to enforcement in no time! Furthermore, our interactive and user-friendly dashboard automatically generates:
- Aggregate Reports (RUA) for all your registered domains, which are simplified and converted into readable tables and charts from complex XML file format for your understanding.
- Forensic reports (RUF) with encryption
All you need to do is:
- Use PowerDMARC’s free SPF record generator to publish your SPF record in your DNS and align your emails with SPF authentication with just a few clicks!
- Use PowerDMARC’s free DKIM record generator to publish your DKIM record in your DNS and align your emails with DKIM authentication with just a few clicks!
- After successfully configuring SPF and DKIM for your domain, you can generate your free DMARC record with PowerDMARC and select your desired DMARC policy with ease.
The DMARC policy can be set to :
- p=none (DMARC is set at monitoring only, wherein emails failing SPF and DKIM will still be delivered to your recipient’s inboxes, however, you will be getting aggregate reports informing you about the authentication results)
- p=quarantine (DMARC is set at enforcement level, wherein emails failing SPF and DKIM will be delivered to the spam box instead of your recipient’s inbox)
- p=reject (DMARC is set at maximum enforcement level, wherein emails failing SPF and DKIM would either be deleted or not delivered at all)
Why PowerDMARC?
PowerDMARC is a single email authentication SaaS platform that combines all email authentication best practices such as DMARC, SPF, DKIM, BIMI, MTA-STS and TLS-RPT, under the same roof. We provide optimal visibility into your email ecosystem with the help of our detailed aggregate reports, and help you automatically update changes to your dashboard without you having to update your DNS manually.
We tailor solutions to your domain and handle everything for you completely in the background, all the way from configuration to set up to monitoring. We help you implement DMARC correctly to help keep impersonation attacks at bay!
So sign up with PowerDMARC to configure DMARC for your domain correctly today!
