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DMARC policy discovery ran out of queries

CODE RED

DMARC · Critical · costs 40 points · RFC 9989 section 4.10

What it means

Receivers walk up the DNS tree looking for your policy and stop after 8 queries. example.com is deep enough that the walk ends before a record is found, so receivers apply no DMARC at all.

How to fix it

Publish a DMARC record closer to the sending domain, at example.com itself, or at its organizational domain.

Check your own domain

This page describes the condition. To find out whether your domain has it, run the DMARC test or the full checkup, which examines every record at once.

Understand it properly

This page covers one condition. For the whole picture, The DMARC guide, from a first record to enforcement, or start at the Health Library.

Where this comes from

We judge this against RFC 9989 section 4.10. Every finding on this site cites the specification behind it so you can check the work rather than take our word for it.

Other DMARC conditions

DMARC_TREE_WALK_CAPPED

Every fix on this site is yours to implement. If you would rather someone did it, I take this work directly.