Known Sources

So you’re successfully receiving DMARC reports, but now you might be wondering what it all means. In particular, there’s a section labelled Known Sources that has quite a bit of data. There’s also an Unknown Sources section that we’ll address in a separate help article. For now, we’re going to dig in and look at the variety of possible results you might see in your known sources. Everything under Known Sources will not be rejected or quarantined by your DMARC policy. Any email from a known source is effectively a pass even if it is only partially aligned and not fully aligned.

There are multiple ways that a given source can be classified as known according to your DMARC policy’s details. The important thing to understand is that for a source to be known only one of SPF or DKIM have to be aligned. If both are aligned, that’s great, but as long as one is aligned, then everything’s good.

These various outcomes for each individual email will be tallied and summarized in your DMARC report. The DMARC Alignment column shows the percentage of emails that are either SPF or DKIM aligned and therefore pass DMARC.

In the above example, all of the sources are considered known sources even though not all messages were SPF and DKIM aligned.