Identifying Email Authentication Issues With RUA Or DMARC Aggregate Report

 Email authentication is a critical component of email security and it’s necessary to ensure that emails originate from a trusted source. Unauthenticated emails can lead to spoofing, phishing, and other fraudulent activities, which can be damaging to your organization. To identify email authentication issues, organizations should rely on RUA (Reporting Unauthenticated Activity) or DMARC aggregate reports. 

RUA and DMARC aggregate reports provide valuable insights about the email authentication status of emails sent from your organization and help identify malicious or fraudulent activity. In this blog post, explore the importance of email authentication and the role of RUA and DMARC aggregate reports in identifying email authentication issues. 

RUA or DMARC Aggregate Report is an XML file containing details about the authentication of an email. This report contains information regarding SMTP-authenticated emails that have used SPF and DKIM and which have not been.

The reports don't contain information concerning the content of each individual email from every department, but they include the IP address or sending domain, the number of emails sent, the SPF DKIM authentication result, which helps identify which systems send emails for an organization, and the date sent.



What information is included in each aggregate report?

An aggregate report provides the public DMARC report, email authentication results, and an analysis of your Internet service. The specific section details are listed below.

The ISP information are:

  • The identification number of this report.
  • The beginning and end dates and times, as represented by seconds, are displayed.
  • Demonstrating a company's name.
  • Mail address and any other contact information for reporting organizations.

The DMARC record and authentication results also contain the information indicated below:

  • The DMARC percentage of emails to which this solution is applied.
  • Each header contains the header information.
  • Domain and subdomain access policies adhere to.
  • DKIM and SPF setup alignment.
  • The IP address of the sender of the e-mail.
  • All the IP addresses assigned to the domain are being used.
  • The message's disposition is altered.
  • SPF and DKIM authentication test results and the domain referenced will display in the SPF and DKIM authentication status section.

Setup DMARC Aggregates:

The first step to receive DMARC Aggregate Reports is to create the DMARC Record that DMARC will use to send the reports to the receiver for verifying successful authentication. Each DMARC record will contain a RUA tag in the format:

rua-mailto:sample@domain

The recipient ISP will send the aggregated reports on the aggregate reporting tag or RUA to the email specified by the reporting organization. These RUA reports will be sent each day by the sending organization in an XML reporting and contain the traffic details.

System administrators can set a ri tag representing the aggregate reporting interval, delivering RUA statistics to the business at the interval designated. By default, this interval is scheduled as 24 hours, but may change if necessary.



The Benefits of DMARC Aggregates:

Modern digital environments have necessitated the development of aggregate reports so that businesses can stay abreast of important developments. Advantages of using RUA or DMARC Aggregate Reports are listed below. Click here to to know more about the DMARC report.


  1.  The Daily Report was sent to the inbox:

Since the communication between businesses is mostly by email, they need to update the status of the sent emails every day. That's why these RUA reports will be sent to the source every day.


  2.  Improve email delivery:

Businesses may identify email authentication issues by analyzing aggregate reports. The effort allows them to fix any such issues before transmitting emails to the same destination once again.


  3.  Use IP Addresses to identify malicious IP addresses:

Another feature of the RUA reports is that it records IP address tracing and other information to reveal the origin of the transmission of malicious emails. Therefore, the central system administrator can view which system sent malicious emails and take the proper corrective actions to prevent similar incidents in the future.


  4.  If required: Make plans for fast mitigation:

As each RUA report is sent to the designated recipient daily, different glitches can be interpreted following the analysis of the data, allowing targeted treatment regimens to be implemented promptly.



In summary, using RUA or DMARC aggregate reports to detect email authentication problems is an effective way to ensure that messages are delivered securely and properly. It allows businesses to identify potential issues and fix them quickly, saving them time, money, and potential customer trust. Furthermore, businesses can use these reports to gain insight into their email authentication process and make changes to ensure that it is up to industry standards.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gmail DMARC Demystified: Protecting Your Email From Cyber Threats

The Importance Of DMARC Alignment: Securing Your Emails