DMARC Report Received from ActiveCampaign: What You Need to Know
February 17, 2025 | 3 min read
Understanding DMARC Reports from ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a powerful marketing automation platform that helps businesses send targeted email campaigns and manage customer interactions. Ensuring that emails sent through ActiveCampaign are properly authenticated is essential for protecting your domain from phishing and spoofing attacks while maintaining strong deliverability rates. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) reports from ActiveCampaign offer valuable insights into how recipient servers handle your emails based on SPF and DKIM checks, helping you protect your email reputation and improve overall security.
Key Components of ActiveCampaign DMARC Reports:
1. Source IP Address: This shows the IP address used by ActiveCampaign to send your emails. Tracking this helps ensure that emails are originating from authorized ActiveCampaign IP addresses and not from unauthorized sources, protecting your domain from impersonation.
2. DKIM Alignment Results: Indicates whether the DKIM signature in your emails matches the domain in the “From” header. ActiveCampaign supports DKIM signing, and ensuring proper alignment is crucial for passing DMARC checks and improving email deliverability.
3. SPF Alignment Results: Verifies whether the sending IP from ActiveCampaign is authorized by your SPF record to send emails on your domain’s behalf. SPF alignment helps ensure that only authorized IP addresses are permitted to send emails from your domain.
4. Disposition: Tells you how the recipient server handled your emails (e.g., delivered, quarantined, or rejected) based on the DMARC policy settings you’ve implemented.
5. Message Count: Displays the number of emails that met specific criteria and were sent from a particular IP, helping you track your email campaigns and detect any suspicious or unauthorized activity.
Automating DMARC Parsing for ActiveCampaign
Given the high volume of marketing and automated emails typically sent through ActiveCampaign, manually parsing DMARC XML reports can be time-consuming. Automating this process with tools like Skysnag simplifies DMARC management, providing clearer insights and quicker response times.
– Data Aggregation from Multiple Providers: If you use ActiveCampaign alongside other email providers, Skysnag aggregates DMARC reports from all sources into a unified view. This allows you to easily manage email authentication data across multiple platforms.
– Visualizing Key Metrics: Skysnag transforms raw DMARC XML data from ActiveCampaign into visual dashboards that display critical metrics such as DKIM/SPF pass rates, unauthorized email attempts, and the top IP addresses sending emails. This helps you identify and resolve issues quickly.
– Automated Incident Response: Skysnag provides real-time alerts when emails sent through ActiveCampaign fail DMARC checks (e.g., SPF or DKIM misalignment). You can take immediate action to address these issues, such as updating your DNS records or blocking suspicious IP addresses.
– Forensic Reporting: Some DMARC reports include forensic data such as full email headers for failed messages. For ActiveCampaign users, this information is invaluable for troubleshooting why certain emails didn’t pass authentication checks and for improving email security.
Ensuring Proper DMARC Alignment for ActiveCampaign
To maximize DMARC effectiveness and ensure proper email delivery through ActiveCampaign, it is important to maintain DKIM and SPF alignment with the domain used in the “From” header. If DKIM or SPF are not aligned, emails might be quarantined or rejected, even if they pass other security checks. Proper alignment helps safeguard your email marketing campaigns from being flagged or rejected by recipient servers.
Skysnag’s Custom Solutions for ActiveCampaign:
– DKIM Key Management: Skysnag ensures that DKIM keys for your ActiveCampaign emails are properly aligned and up-to-date. If there are any DKIM misalignments or outdated keys, Skysnag will alert you, enabling you to quickly fix the issue and maintain compliance with DMARC.
– SPF Flattening: Using multiple email services like ActiveCampaign can lead to complex SPF records, which may result in DNS lookup failures. Skysnag automates SPF flattening to optimize your SPF record, preventing it from exceeding DNS lookup limits and ensuring seamless authentication.
– Policy Recommendations: Based on patterns identified in your ActiveCampaign DMARC reports, Skysnag can suggest policy updates, such as moving from “none” to stricter enforcement modes like “quarantine” or “reject.” This helps protect your domain from email spoofing and phishing attacks while maintaining strong email deliverability.
By automating DMARC report parsing and providing tailored solutions for ActiveCampaign, tools like Skysnag ensure that your emails are properly authenticated, securely delivered, and protected from unauthorized use, maximizing both your domain’s reputation and email performance.
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