DMARC report recognition

During the Christmas holidays we've been working on improving the recognition of incoming DMARC reports. An improved algorithm has been implemented and will be available in the upcoming version of MailerQ.

Background information

Most of our customers only use MailerQ to send out email, but you can use our MTA to handle incoming messages as well. This can be very useful, because it allows you to handle your whole email flow in RabbitMQ - a technology that is much easier to work with and that scales much better than traditional mail storage on disk.

You can even configure MailerQ to automatically scan all incoming messages, and filter out regular email from automated reports like Delivery Status Notifications (DSN's) and DMARC reports. If you've set up MailerQ in such a way, regular incoming messages are sent to the normal inbox queue, while report messages are published to the reports queue.

It is exactly this algorithm that we've been working on. We found out that not every DMARC report that MailerQ receives complies with the standard published in the DMARC RFC. Some mail servers still use an outdated initial draft of the protocol, and send DMARC reports in an outdated format, or they even send reports that do not comply with any standard at all.

Loose parsing

To overcome this, we've loosened the DMARC report parser. MailerQ now also recognizes DMARC reports that do not fully comply with the standard. Please note that this could also influence your environment after you've upgraded MailerQ, because you may find more DMARC reports in the report queue than you did before.