emailrules.today
Stop 8 of 8DeepThe next morning

rua (DMARC reports)

An email address in your DMARC record where aggregate reports about your domain are sent.

Say it out loud

“A daily report from every major provider telling us who is sending email as us. Without it we are publishing policy blind.”

rua is the DMARC tag naming where receivers send aggregate XML reports. They arrive daily, from everyone, and they show which sources sent mail claiming your domain and whether the checks passed. Publishing DMARC without rua is publishing a policy you cannot evaluate.

In your dataWhat the daily XML actually tells youPublished valuesscrolls →
<source_ip>198.51.100.25</source_ip>
<count>1420</count>

1,420 messages sent as your domain, from an IP. Do you recognise it?

<policy_evaluated>
<disposition>none</disposition>
<dkim>fail</dkim> <spf>pass</spf>

This is the forgotten-vendor pattern: SPF was updated for them, DKIM never was.

</policy_evaluated>
Reports arrive daily, from every major receiver.

Nobody reads raw DMARC XML twice. Point rua at a parser, not at a human's inbox.

Yours

Nobody does this for you.

What goes wrong

Setting rua to your own work address. Within a week it is hundreds of compressed XML attachments, it gets filtered, and the reason you published DMARC in the first place quietly stops happening.

Not the same as

ruf (forensic reports)
Per-failure copies of individual messages. Most large receivers do not send them, and they can contain recipient data, which is why most senders do not ask for them.

The dated rule behind this

A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.

See also

Where this sits

Stop 8, it comes back as numbers. The reactions become a dashboard, and the dashboard is lying to you a little.

← BeforeHoldout groupNext →Seed test / seed list

FAQ

Awkward questions

Who is this actually for?

People who ship email and are too busy to re-read every PDF: week-one marketers, lifecycle/CRM, deliverability, multi-country ops, DTC brands, agencies — on Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Braze, HubSpot, SFMC, or something else. Pick your tool and geos so product-specific pages only appear when they match. EU and UK are first-class filters. Not for people who sell tools about email and need a fake score to demo.

Why only ~40 rules? Isn’t that… thin?

On purpose. A wall of 400 undated “best practices” is how you look busy and still get burned. Every page needs a primary source we actually read. Thin and checkable beats fat and folklore. Europe, bulk inbox rules, measurement honesty, and protocol topics like BIMI/DMARC policy are on the shelf when we can cite them — not every Member State and not every vendor myth. Coverage map lists what we still refuse to invent.

Is this legal advice?

No. If it were, you’d have a billable hour and a longer PDF. This is a dated operator reference written by an email geek. Confirm anything high-stakes with counsel who knows your facts. Same for “will this make me compliant?” — no tool does that. Lawyers and judges do. We say what the sources say and what to do first on Monday.

Why no trust score out of 100?

Because we refuse to invent a number you can’t audit. Fake scores sell seed tests and panic. You get findings, dates, and links. If that feels less exciting than a red dial, good — you’re not the red-dial customer.

Why should I trust you more than my ESP’s blog?

ESPs sell seats. Seed-score vendors sell fear. AI invents citations when nobody watches. We sell nothing today — no pixels, no placement scores, no affiliate — so we can say when a tool is the problem. A human verifies, dates, and corrects in public. Tools may help draft; they do not ship unsourced claims. Check the primary links. Fail that test and leave.

Do I need an account?

No. Filters live in this browser and the URL. Share the link. That’s it. Accounts come later only if they earn it — not so we can nurture you about email.

I’m an agency. Where’s multi-client mode?

We tried a client-name CRM on the setup card. It made the product feel like work before it felt useful. Role filters + copy link + one-page brief (optional PDF title) is enough for now. Complexity comes back when the free shelf is habit, not before.

Is the quiet changelog a bug?

No. Quiet means nothing material moved. We don’t invent urgency so the homepage looks “alive.” Sticky risks still show what usually needs a person when the market is still.