Proofpoint is requiring their customers to pay for Email Fraud Defense to get aggregate DMARC data from their gateways

A redacted screenshot of the Proofpoint Email Fraud Defense dashboard

I have written extensively about the DMARC email security standard, including publishing a comprehensive guide on how to implement it, with or without additional third-party vendors.  I also do a little consulting on DMARC deployment best practices. One of those consulting clients uses Proofpoint for their email gateway. They also use Dmarcian, a reasonably priced DMARC report analytics service that also publishes a ton of public content for the good of the community. We were considering moving the client’s DMARC policy from monitor only (p=none) to an enforced state (p=reject) after many hours of steadily improving the SPF and DKIM alignment of their email sources. As I took another look at the aggregate (rua) DMARC data in Dmarcian, I noticed something odd: Dmarcian was getting aggregate reports from all of the expected third-party email recipients, like Google, Yahoo, Comcast, and the client’s industry partners, but I didn’t see any reporting from the client’s own Proofpoint Secure Email Gateway (SEG).

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