DMARC Dashboard: email authentication checked and explained in one place

Why JWWD built a free checker that answers a question clients ask us all the time: is my email set up properly?

The problem

Email authentication is dense. SPF, DKIM and DMARC have similar names and cryptic records, and getting them wrong means missed customer emails, messages in spam, or a domain that scammers can send mail as.

When a client asked whether their email was set up correctly, answering properly took three different tools, a handful of manual DNS lookups and a cheat sheet to decode the results. Most free tools just dump raw DNS output and leave the interpretation to you.

What we built

DMARC Dashboard runs all the checks in one go and explains what it finds. Enter a domain and you get:

  • DMARC: the raw record plus a table of every tag, with a warning if the policy is still “none”.
  • SPF: the record, the services it includes, and whether it ends in an enforcing -all or ~all.
  • DKIM: a probe of 13 common selectors used by mail platforms such as Google, Microsoft 365, Mailgun, Amazon SES and Postmark, including keys published as CNAMEs.
  • MX: the domain’s mail servers in priority order.

Every problem comes back as a plain-English issue, alongside an overall grade.

How it's built

  • Plain PHP and live DNS: Every check is a direct DNS lookup at the moment you ask. There’s no account and no database.
  • Grading weighted to the real risk: DMARC carries the most weight, with extra credit for moving past “none” and again for “reject”. SPF comes next, then DKIM and MX. A domain with tidy SPF but no DMARC policy can’t score well, because it can still be spoofed.
  • Honest about its limits: DKIM selectors can be named anything, so the check is best effort. When nothing turns up, the tool says no common selectors were found rather than claiming DKIM is missing.
  • One shared engine: The live tool and our offline scanner run the same code file, so published research grades domains exactly the way the tool does.

Research and reference from the same engine

DMARC Dashboard publishes its own report on email authentication across Australian domains, checking the DMARC, SPF and DKIM records of every .au domain in the Tranco top million list.

Every figure on the report page is read from the scan data when the page loads, never typed in by hand. If the data file is missing, the page says so instead of showing zeroes, because a 0% would read as a finding.

Alongside the tool sit a DMARC tag reference and plain-English guides on SPF, DKIM, BIMI and moving a DMARC policy from monitoring to enforcement.

The result

A free check that turns a half-hour of DNS digging into a single report a business owner can actually read, with no signup and no premium tier. We built it because email that doesn’t arrive costs a business real work, and the answer shouldn’t need three tools. See the DMARC Dashboard tool page for a quick overview.

Have a project like this in mind? Talk to JWWD.