Now that you’ve added and validated your first domain, DMARCwise will start receiving DMARC reports.

Reports are usually delivered by mail servers once a day, so you won’t see much initially.

In the meantime, what you can do is run a DMARC diagnosis, to quickly evaluate whether your sending setup is correctly configured.

To start a diagnosis:

  • Open the DMARCwise dashboard.
  • Choose your domain.
  • Click on the Diagnoses tab.
  • Click Start a diagnosis.
  • You will be provided with an email address specific for this diagnosis: send an email to this address. The email can be empty.
  • Wait a few seconds for the email to be processed by DMARCwise.

Which mailbox should I test?

Depending on how you send email from your domain, you may want to run multiple tests from multiple sources.

For example, you may have your main email inbox hosted by Google Workspace, so you should test sending and email from that. Any inbox will do.

But you may also be using a service like Mailchimp, to send newsletters to your users.

Each of these sending sources will have different sending configurations, so you should test all of them. All DMARCwise plans include unlimited diagnoses.

Once the email is processed, you will be redirected to the diagnosis results.

To understand what’s going on you might need to have some background of SPF, DKIM and DMARC (read Introduction to DMARC).

The diagnosis results will tell you:

  • SPF: the result is pass if the IP address from which the email message was sent is authorized to send emails on behalf of the Envelope From domain (which might be different from the From domain).
  • SPF alignment: to achieve DMARC alignment, the SPF domain should match (in a strict or relaxed way) the domain in the From address.
  • DKIM: we’ll check if the DKIM signatures contained in the email message are valid.
  • DKIM alignment: similarly to SPF alignment, the domain of at least one DKIM signature should match the one contained in the From address.
  • DMARC: finally, we’ll combine all the results above and see if the DMARC evaluation is pass or fail.

It’s very important that you don’t underestimate a failure of SPF alignment or DKIM alignment: they should both be aligned for best deliverability in all cases.

If you’re unsure what’s going on and want help fixing authentication issues, feel free to contact us.

Once you’re ready, you can continue with Exploring the reports.