Glossary
EMAIL AUTH

RUF

Reporting URI for Forensic — the DMARC field naming the mailbox that receives per-message forensic failure reports. Rarely used due to privacy concerns.

RUF (Reporting URI for Forensic) is the DMARC field specifying where receivers should send per-message forensic failure reports. Each RUF report contains headers, body extracts, and authentication results for a single message that failed DMARC.

Record Format

_dmarc.example.com.  TXT  "v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:rua@example.com; ruf=mailto:ruf@example.com;"

Why It’s Rarely Used

Most large receivers — Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook — don’t send RUF reports at all, citing privacy regulations. RUF reports contain end-user email content, which is protected personal data under GDPR and similar frameworks.

When It Does Fire

Some smaller providers (Mail.ru, Yandex) send RUF, and self-hosted enterprises may generate them for incident-response workflows.

Alternative

Skip RUF and rely on RUA aggregate reports for pattern detection, plus your own SIEM logs for message-level forensics.

Read what DMARC is, check the RUA glossary entry, and learn how to read a DMARC report.