A reject policy is one of the most important things for managing your website. It prevents your potential customers from canceling their orders just because they aren’t happy with your product or service. Most people understand that you should tell customers why their orders are being denied, but not all websites put that information in place.

This means your potential customers could be missing out on valuable information about your product, and you could be losing potential sales. One easy way to make sure that doesn’t happen is by implementing a domain-by-domain reject policy on your website. A domain reject policy is a set of instructions that tell Google which parts of your website to reject based on their criteria.

Some browsers automatically reject certain types of links, while others allow you to manually edit the list of domains and links you want to prevent from showing up in search results. These steps will help you get past most blocks created by your browser when trying to access blocked links, but they won’t solve all problems. Some top media sites have had success with implementing a Reject policy as far back as 2004.

(NOTE: before starting, it helps to know a little about these policies. If you want to learn more about DMARC and the policies that it relies on, check out our info pages, About DMARC, About SPF, and About DKIM.)

1.Turn on DMARC reporting

You can monitor your domain's security by reporting any errors and security issues to your domain's reporting service via DMARC. You can also receive reports from a variety of third-party services, like Secure and Monitoring. The first step is to begin monitoring your domain with DMARC. Create a policy and set it to none. This allows you to receive DMARC reports without impacting your mail flow. If you discover any security issues, report them to Secure or another reporting service.

2. Monitor DMARC Reports

Once you have a DMARC policy, wait for DMARC data to come from the ISPs that process your sent email. It’s helpful to wait about a week so you will have enough data to start working on your policies. Monitoring DMARC reports is critical to preventing spammers from sending you may have received reports from someone claiming that they have sponsored your domain. It could be a scammer trying to take advantage of you or your business. There’s a big difference between monitoring your domain’s SPF and monitoring your domain’s DKIM. SPF is designed to help notify you if your domain name is previously reported as being involved with spam. DKIM, on the other hand, prevents spammers from sending emails to previously un-tagged recipients.

Monitoring DMARC reports is especially important if you are using an SMTP service, because people can retrieve information about your messages from both report systems. Failures of DMARC could result in your message not getting delivered (spamming), or the message not getting archived at all (receiving junk). On the other hand, successful reports might cause people to read more about your services or products In addition to regular monitoring of DMARC reports, you should also configure SPF records for all sending domains using Open DKIM configuration files included in the distribution. This will make it much harder for attackers who are able to spoof email addresses to spoof your SPF record and receive messages from your domain The purpose of these reports is to see if you can get discounts if you use certain information related to your domain name in sending emails and web spiders look for these selectors in your email body.

When you monitor these kinds of things, it is very important to pay attention to how many spiders are getting the alert about the changes you are making. The more spiders that notice, the more likely it is that they will act on the information and send you an email about it. Monitoring DMARC reports is an important part of SPF. It will let you know immediately if a potential forwarder- email server is spoofing (it could be an already-identified SPF structure that doesn't follow SPF activity guidelines) or masquerading as a genuine SPF report service.  Mail protocol allows SPF developers to easily integrate DMARC into SPF records.

The primary benefit of monitoring DMARC reports is that they show you whether typical patterns of identity theft are occurring. If you consistently receive emails from senders with very low domains or SPF records, it may be worthwhile to consider implementing anti-spam filters for the email accounts used for sending these kinds of emails.

3. Move to Quarantine

Email spam filters can detect when an email contains the phrase from the company or were hiring. Quarantine emails do not contain these phrases. Yet, they can nonetheless disrupt email transmission because the receiving email service has to capture and handle each message as if it came from the specified company. The risk of accidentally triggering Quarantine is low, but there is no way for a recipient to know if they have received an unauthorized email unless they view their spam folder. It turns out that Twitter has a way to monitor DMARC reports for your domain.

This can help you identify problems with sending emails, identify sent emails that might fail SPF or DKIM checks or even tell you if an attacker has gained access to your domain through an insider. In addition, Twitter has a more advanced DMARC processor that can tell you more about who is trying to access your emails. Monitoring DMARC reports is critical to sending mail from your domain (and from other domains that you own) with the best possible SPF, DKIM, and DMARC headers. Spam filters in your DMARC filter list can prevent transmission of junk emails. Forwarders that forward individual emails do not need to keep track of your SPF or DKIM. If either of these are set to false by default, then the forwarder will not recognize the email originator even if it has SPF or DKIM enabled.

4. Turn On a Reject Policy

To switch off DMARC for a moment, go to the web interface and go to Settings > Mail. The Mail section has a switch called Turn on Reject. By default, this is set to Off. You can flip it On and it will send only an email when you have unread items. To stop receiving emails completely, turn it Off. Quarantine is an anti-spam tool. It looks at email addresses to see if they are already in quarantine. If so it will reject the email.

For some email providers quarantine isn’t really an option and you need to turn on a reject policy. It will look at each email individually and base its decision on whether the email can be delivered or not. There are a lot of email services out there and each service will have its own quarantine options so you may have to trial and adjust a lot of them before hitting on one that works for you.

5. Keep Monitoring Your DMARC Reports

Keep monitoring your DMARC reports for attempted phishing attacks and to update SPF and DKIM. If you’re receiving alerts from Google but aren’t sure if the site you’re trying to visit is protected, throw up a SPF and DKIM policy one day before you visit and see if anyone notices. If they do, they will likely change their behavior next time around. It may take some time for Google to update their reporting systems but there is no harm waiting until then. Keep monitoring your DMARC reports for attempted phishing attacks and to update SPF and DKIM.  

You cannot rely on SPF alone to protect you against spammers, and you may find that bogus emails are being used to send real emails. Real live people have accounts at email services such as gmail, outlook, yahoo! and other providers, so you should be concerned if their DMARC entries show false positives. Not all SPF providers keep records of all senders. In particular, spammers often inject fake email headers into legitimate emails they create to trick recipients into revealing their private information. If you find yourself receiving emails from unknown senders with unusual characteristics, double check SPF records and other settings on your emails. monitoring your SPF and DKIM keys regularly, you can detect if an attacker has successfully spoofed your domain name. It’s also a guide for running a timely SPF check using just email no need for browser plugins or manual sending of SPF reports. If you find yourself consistently missing out on opportunities to improve your domain's visibility in search engines, consider implementing.

This post walks you through the process of how to setup DKIM keys on a domain and create SPF records for your domain. This process is required for the validation of domain ownership and account recovery after a spoof or phishing attack. You will learn how to set up DKIM and SPF in bash and  The first part of this blog post explains how to setup the necessary files for validation. You will then be able to set up SPF records in a more elegant way.

Monitoring your DMARC records is an essential step in preventing domain name theft. If you have been using shared hosting with another party, it is also important to coordinate with that party to keep a close eye on your records. By monitoring your records regularly, you can take preventative measures before any sensitive data flows into their server. Be sure to also take advantage of industry-leading domain name safety features like SPF records, computerized monitoring and additional layers of security.

It’s important to maintain security once you achieve Reject, as any slip-ups would either allow attackers to send authenticated phishing email from your domain or block your legitimate email.