You have set up your DMARC record within ReachMail and are now getting these Weekly DMARC Summary reports. But what do all those numbers mean? Let's break it down to help you understand what data you have at your fingertips.
Here is an example report with the identifiable data redacted.
This column shows the unique number of failures between the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC failures.
This column will usually have high numbers of failures as the emails you are sending through ReachMail. This is because the IP used to send the email is not the same IP for your sending domain. This is a fact that can't be changed. But the reason for this record is that you approve our IP from sending emails on your behalf. So you pass the authentication (allowing us to send) but fail the alignment (the IPs don't match).
This column is where we can tell if something could be happening. The purpose of DKIM is a signature that says this email hasn't been changed from the original when you hit send. So there will be a small number of failures here for a reasonable-sized send. This is because there are some forwarding agents that add headers or mangle the headers sent, which invalidates the DKIM. So the goal here is to have a rate that is as low as possible. The real tell with this column is this number is usually very small or very big; there is not much in between. This record is either working, or it isn't. The goal is under 10%.
This column can be misleading if your DMARC policy is p=none. There will not be DMARC failures with this policy. Because your emails are not failing due to the DMARC policy. There are 3 DMARC policy options: None tells the mailbox provider to do whatever they see fit with your email. This is most often called the monitoring phase. Where you review reports and make sure that all the emails being sent from your domain are being authenticated properly. These next two are called enforcement policies. Quarantine, which means if it fails DMARC, please put this email in the spam/junk folder, and Reject, which means bounce any emails that fail DMARC. If you have an enforcement policy and there are failures here above 10% or so, then there could be an issue.
If you have any questions after reviewing your data, please reach out to support@reachmail.com, and we will help you review your data.