DMARC Policy Readiness

The Policy Readiness card tells you whether your domain is ready to move to a stricter DMARC policy. It performs a set of safety checks before you (or the system automatically) upgrades from p=none → p=quarantine → p=reject.

The Three Policies

Policy	Effect on Failing Email	When to Use
p=none	Delivered normally — monitoring only	Starting point. Collect data, identify sources.
p=quarantine	Sent to spam/junk folder	95%+ compliance. Legitimate email still gets through.
p=reject	Blocked completely — not delivered	99%+ compliance. Maximum protection against spoofing.

Readiness Requirements

Requirement	For Quarantine	For Reject
DMARC Pass Rate	95%+	99%+
Minimum Email Volume	1,000+ messages in the monitoring period
Stable Compliance	No significant drops in the last 30 days
No Critical Failures	No high-volume sources with both SPF and DKIM failing

Readiness Status Indicators

✓

Ready

All requirements met. You can upgrade now, or let the automated progression handle it.

⚠

Almost Ready

Pass rate is close but not quite there. Approve a few more sources to push over the threshold.

✗

Not Ready

Compliance is too low or there are critical unresolved failures. Fix authentication issues before upgrading.

Gradual Rollout with pct=

DMARC Busta uses the pct= tag to apply policies incrementally rather than all at once. For example, when moving to quarantine, you might progress through:

p=quarantine pct=10 — 10% of failing emails go to spam
p=quarantine pct=50 — 50% of failing emails go to spam
p=quarantine pct=100 — all failing emails go to spam

This lets you catch any unexpected delivery issues before full enforcement applies.

Don't Skip Quarantine

Going straight from p=none to p=reject is risky. The quarantine phase gives you time to catch legitimate sources that may have been missed during the monitoring phase, before they're completely blocked.

DMARC Policy Readiness