DMARC Quarantine Issues
I saw the following error with a client the other day when sending emails from the client to any of the Virgin Media owned consumer ISP email addresses (virginmedia.com, ntlworld.com, blueyonder.com etc.)
mx3.mnd.ukmail.iss.as9143.net gave this error:
vLkg1v00o2hp5bc01Lkg9w DMARC validation failed with result 3.00:quarantine
In the above, the server name (…as9143.net) might change as will the value before the error, but either DMARC validation failed with result 3.00:quarantine or 4.00:reject is the end of the error message.
We resolved this error by shorting the DMARC record of the sending organization. Before we made the change we had a DMARC record of 204 characters. We cannot find a reference online to the maximum length of a DMARC record, though we could successfully add a record of this length to Route 53 DNS provided by AWS, though a record of 277 characters was not allowed in AWS. Other references online to domain character length seem to imply that 255 characters is the max, but not specifically for DMARC.
So, shortening the DMARC record to remove two of the three email addresses in each of the RUA and RUF values was the fix that we needed. This change was done for two reasons, first the above error occurred only with emails to Virgin Media and sometimes an NDR would be received and other times the NDR would fail, but the original email never made it through and secondly the two removed email addresses where not actively being checked for DMARC status messages anyway and so there is no harm in the removal of them from the DMARC record anyway!
The original DMARC record we had this issue with looked like this (xxx.xxxxx representing the client domain):
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; fo=1;rua=mailto:admin@xxx.xxxxx,mailto:dmarc-rua@dmarc.service.gov.uk,mailto:dmarc@xxx.xxxxx;ruf=mailto:admin@xxx.xxxxx,mailto:dmarc-ruf@dmarc.service.gov.uk,mailto:dmarc@xxx.xxxxx;
Then we changed the record to the following to resolve it:
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; fo=1;rua=mailto:dmarc-rua@dmarc.service.gov.uk;ruf=mailto:dmarc-ruf@dmarc.service.gov.uk;
Reducing the length of the record resulted in DMARC analytics and forensic email not going to mailboxes at the client (one of whom those mailboxes did not exist anyway) and only going to the UK government DMARC policy checking service, but most importantly for a client that has a requirement to respond to citizen’s emails (and whom could easily be using Virgin Media email addresses) we resolved the issue.