Should I build or buy a DMARC reporting tool?
Summary
What email marketers say8Marketer opinions
Email marketer from easydmarc.com suggests considering factors like setup costs, ongoing maintenance, data storage, reporting features, and support when evaluating the cost-effectiveness of building versus buying a DMARC reporting solution.
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests the choice depends on the desired information and its intended use, noting that dashboard companies offer similar variations.
Email marketer from StackExchange explains there are a few open-source DMARC reporting tools to parse the reports, store them, and visualize the data in an actionable way.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that third-party services offer a user-friendly interface, automated report processing, and expert support but costs more.
Email marketer from emailsecurityguru.com explains that before deciding whether to build or buy a DMARC reporting tool, companies need to determine their specific needs, budget and technical know how.
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests building in-house on an IaaS platform like Amazon for scalability and using ParseDMARC if storing and querying reports with other internal tools is useful.
Email marketer from dmarcian.com explains that a DMARC reporting tool provides visibility into email authentication failures, helping identify phishing attempts and domain spoofing, and enabling the implementation of DMARC policies.
Email marketer from Reddit explains that while building in-house offers customization, it demands significant time and expertise. Pre-built solutions offer faster deployment and ongoing support, particularly beneficial for organizations lacking specialized staff.
What the experts say7Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks explains the challenge is presenting the DMARC data actionably, which depends on the internal groups using it, their plans, the business model, and mail streams.
Expert from Email Geeks suggests exploring DMARC reporting tools on GitHub and recommends a Grafana dashboard if an elastic search tool is already in use.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that if you select a vendor to help deploy DMARC, you should determine if you are okay with the vendor having access to your data and if they are upfront about how they treat the data.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that for companies sending a lot of email, they may want to build their own DMARC reporting tools, though they'll also need to build their own parsing software for the raw data.
Expert from Email Geeks states that if digging into failures for phishing is the goal, filtering and clustering become critical, especially with large volumes of minor issues and background noise.
Expert from Email Geeks highlights the need to consider both the back-end data collection and the reporting pieces, asking if the company already has a way to create dashboards.
Expert from Email Geeks recommends having the team tasked with using the data assess outsourced options for usefulness, noting the product isn't deeply differentiated.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from learn.microsoft.com outlines how to configure DMARC settings in Exchange Online and interpret reports, critical for understanding mail flow and authentication issues within Microsoft's ecosystem. This documentation would be used for understanding DMARC reporting.
Documentation from support.google.com details how to set up and interpret DMARC reports within the Google Workspace environment, providing insights into authentication failures and potential security threats which is useful when setting up a DMARC reporting tool.
Documentation from datatracker.ietf.org describes the XML schema and provides technical details for interpreting DMARC aggregate reports, essential for building a DMARC reporting tool.
Documentation from github.com outlines that `parsedmarc` is a Python package and command line tool for parsing DMARC aggregate reports, and provides the tools to build you own reporting tool.