Why your DMARC reports never arrive (and why Gmail can't be your rua address)

You published a DMARC record months ago. Every checker says it's valid. No reports have ever arrived, and at some point you stopped thinking about it and quietly concluded nobody's forging your domain. You don't know that. You just can't see. Two causes account for almost all of it, and both leave the DMARC record itself looking perfect. 1. Your reporting address never agreed to receive them This is in the spec and almost nobody knows about it. If your rua= address is on a different organisational domain from the domain publishing the record, RFC 7489 section 7.1 requires the destination to explicitly consent. The reason is obvious once you see it: otherwise anyone could point rua= at your mailbox and use the world's mail infrastructure as a free DDoS. Consent is a DNS record, published by the receiving domain: <your-domain>._report._dmarc.<their-domain>. TXT "v=DMARC1" So if example.com sends reports to dmarc@reports.vendor.com , then vendor.com has to publish: example.com._report._dmarc.reports.vendor.com. TXT "v=DMARC1" Without it, conforming reporters send nothing at all. That includes Google, which is most of your report volume. You can watch this working in production. PayPal sends aggregate reports to a third party, and the authorisation record exists: paypal.com._report._dmarc.rua.agari.com. TXT "v=DMARC1;" The practical consequence: not a Gmail address You cannot put a Gmail address in rua= . Google is not going to publish yourdomain.com._report._dmarc.gmail.com on your behalf, and you can't create records in their zone. Same for Outlook, Yahoo, or any address at a domain you don't control. This is a common first move — publish DMARC, point reports at your personal inbox, wait. Nothing arrives, and nothing is wrong with the record. If you use a commercial DMARC service they normally publish these records during onboarding, often via a wildcard. If reports never start after you sign up, check this before anything else. When it doesn't apply: reporting to you