While email delivery and email deliverability sound very similar, they are two different terms in meaning. Email delivery refers to the process of sending and receiving the email by the email server of the recipient. The term email deliverability, on the other hand, refers to the process of reaching the recipient’s inbox and falling into the spam folder. You can significantly improve your email deliverability by leveraging DMARC, and this user guide will explain to you exactly how to do that!
How DMARC Reports Can Help You Improve Your Email Deliverability?
With DMARC’s reporting capability, sending domains are provided data from the receiving email servers on matters such as the number of both malicious and legitimate emails. Domain owners can use this information to detect email deliverability issues and potentially prevent domain spoofing.
From our proven track record in the field, we can attest that DMARC reports play a crucial role in helping domain owners enhance their email deliverability. These reports can be divided into two main categories: Aggregate and Forensic.
Aggregate reports (RUA) are very useful when it comes to providing a bird's eye view perspective about your overall email traffic. The information found in the aggregate reports will include:
The IP addresses of all those sending the emails on behalf of the given domain, along with the geolocations of the sending sources
The name, contact details, and email address of the reporting entity (e.g. organization)
SPF and DKIM evaluations (i.e. whether or not the emails coming from these IP addresses have passed the SPF and/or DKIM checks)
The corresponding DMARC policy
A list of actions that were taken in accordance with the DMARC policy to mitigate the risks
Forensic reports (RUF), on the other hand, offer a close-up view of the specific authentication failures. Such details include:
Specific email headers
Any URLs that are embedded in the email message
Information about the attached files
Combining these macro and micro perspectives can significantly help domain owners gain visibility into their domain’s email activity and filter legitimate email sources from illegitimate ones.
How Can Illegitimate Emails Sent from Your Domain Impact Email Deliverability?
Illegitimate emails sent from your domain can severely impact your email deliverability and overall reputation. Here's how:
1. Damage to Sender Reputation
Email service providers (ESPs) track the sender's reputation. If illegitimate emails are flagged as spam or reported, your domain's reputation will drop.
A low sender reputation results in your legitimate emails being blocked or landing in spam folders.
2. Increased Blacklisting Risk
Sending illegitimate emails can lead to your domain or IP being added to email blacklists.
Being on a blacklist significantly reduces your ability to send emails to recipients using email systems that reference these lists.
3. Higher Bounce Rates
Illegitimate emails often target invalid or outdated email addresses, leading to increased bounce rates.
High bounce rates signal ESPs that your email practices are not trustworthy, reducing future deliverability.
4. Loss of Trust with Recipients
If recipients receive phishing or spam emails from your domain, they may lose trust in your brand.
This can result in lower open rates, fewer responses, and even manual blocking by recipients.
5. Compromised Email Engagement Metrics
Poor email engagement metrics, such as low open and click-through rates, combined with high spam complaint rates, will affect your ability to reach inboxes.
ESPs might deprioritize your emails, assuming them to be spam.
How PowerDMARC Can Help
As useful as DMARC Aggregate reports are, they have one major drawback. They are generated in the difficult-to-read XML format, which can be very hard to decipher especially if you’re a beginner in the field. At PowerDMARC, we simplify these reports and turn them into easy-to-digest tables and charts to help you understand them easily and effectively. We also offer 7 unique viewing formats (sorted by geolocation, sender source, organization, or other specifics) to help you have a neater, more organized picture of your data.
When it comes to DMARC Forensic reports, because they are very detailed with their micro-view approach, they may often contain sensitive data found in your message contents. To protect this data, PowerDMARC encrypts them with a private key to which you, and only you, have access!
Are you looking for ways to enhance your email deliverability? Contact us today or sign up for a free trial and we will help you reach your email authentication goal quickly and effectively!