How to set up DMARC on GoDaddy

You want a DMARC record on GoDaddy, and what that comes down to is one TXT record at the host _dmarc under your domain, holding a short policy string that begins v=DMARC1.

GoDaddy is the domain registrar and, when its own nameservers are in use, the DNS host for the domain. It stores the DMARC TXT record and answers lookups for it once the nameservers point at GoDaddy, but it does not generate, validate or apply the record’s contents for the reader.

The record comes first on this page, with what each part of it means, and the exact GoDaddy fields it goes into come after, because the record is the same wherever your DNS lives and only the form around it changes.

The record before the console

DMARC is the instruction a receiver reads after it has checked SPF and DKIM on a message claiming to come from your domain. Those two checks each return a pass or a fail. DMARC tells the receiver what you want done with a fail, and where to send a summary of what it saw. The instruction lives in DNS because that’s the one place a receiver anywhere in the world can look up something only the domain’s owner can write.

The host is _dmarc, with the _ character at the front, and the type is TXT. The value to start with is:

v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:[email protected]

Three tags carry the meaning. v=DMARC1 names the version of the standard and has to come first. p= is the policy: none asks receivers to deliver failing mail as they would have anyway and report on it, quarantine asks them to put failing mail in spam or junk, and reject asks them to refuse it during delivery. rua=mailto: names the mailbox that receives the aggregate reports, which arrive as XML attachments listing which servers sent mail as your domain and whether each one passed.

A message passes DMARC when SPF or DKIM passes and the domain that passed matches the domain in the From header. That matching is called alignment, and it’s why a mail provider’s own SPF record isn’t enough on its own: the check has to succeed for your domain, since that’s the one the reader sees.

Other tags turn up in records elsewhere. sp= sets a separate policy for subdomains and defaults to whatever p= says; the subdomain policy piece covers when it’s worth setting. pct= applies the policy to a share of failing mail. adkim= and aspf= switch alignment from relaxed to strict, and ruf= asks for per-message forensic reports, which most large receivers don’t send. Leave all of these out at the start; the three-tag record above is complete and valid.

Start at p=none. Publish p=reject before you know your SPF and DKIM pass on your own mail and you’ll bounce your own invoices along with the forgeries. The reports are how you find that out, so the rua= address has to be a mailbox somebody opens.

Check that GoDaddy answers DNS for the domain

In the GoDaddy account, open the domain and read the Nameservers section. If it shows GoDaddy’s own nameservers, GoDaddy answers DNS for this domain and the record belongs here. If it shows another company’s nameservers, such as a web host, a CDN or the email provider, the record has to be added at that provider instead, because a record added at GoDaddy will have no effect.

GoDaddy publishes exactly what the reader types into the Name and Value fields, once nameservers point at GoDaddy and the record is saved. It does not compose the DMARC string, choose the policy or supply a reporting mailbox; the reader provides all three.

Publish SPF and DKIM before DMARC. The policy tells receivers what to do when those checks fail, so a domain with neither has nothing for DMARC to work from, and a p=reject on such a domain refuses everything that carries its name.

Add the record in the GoDaddy console

Sign in to GoDaddy and open the domain from the account’s domain list.
Open the domain’s DNS settings, labelled DNS, Manage DNS, or DNS / Records depending on the account.
Select Add or Add New Record to start a new DNS entry.
Set the record type field to TXT.
In the Name field or Host field, enter exactly _dmarc, with the leading _ character and nothing appended after it.
In the Value field, paste the DMARC string plain, with no surrounding quotation marks.
Leave the TTL field at its default setting.
Save the record to publish it in GoDaddy DNS.

Set the type field to TXT. In the Name or Host field, type only _dmarc, because GoDaddy appends the domain automatically and typing _dmarc.yourdomain.com puts the record at the wrong host name. In the Value or Content field, paste the full string starting v=DMARC1; with the reader’s own reporting mailbox after rua=mailto:. Leave TTL at the default GoDaddy offers.

Look for an existing TXT record at _dmarc before you add one. A domain gets one DMARC record, and a receiver that finds two treats the domain as having none, so if one is already there you edit it. Paste the value without surrounding quotation marks and without a trailing space or line break, then compare the last few characters against the record above once it’s saved.

Traps in the GoDaddy form

The host name is _dmarc with the _ character. Leaving off the _ character, or typing the full domain after it, puts the record where DMARC is never looked up.
GoDaddy adds the quoting around the value itself, so the Value field takes the string plain, with no quotation marks typed around it.
Only one TXT record should exist at _dmarc. If one is already there, edit it rather than adding a second, since two records at the same host name make the policy ambiguous.
TTL stays at the default GoDaddy sets for a new record; there is no reason to shorten or lengthen it for this record.

A record that’s present and malformed is worse than an absent one in a single respect: it looks done. v=DMARC1 missing from the front, p= misspelt or left out, a rua= without mailto: in front of the address, or curly quotes pasted in from a document all produce a record receivers can’t parse and so ignore. The DMARC typos piece lists the ones that show up most often in the census.

With those checked and the record saved, run the free scan below. It looks up _dmarc on your domain the way a receiving mail server does and tells you whether the record is present, whether it parses, and which policy it carries.

Wait, then read the result

A DNS change at GoDaddy can take from minutes up to a couple of hours to be visible everywhere. The saved record appears back in the same DNS settings screen, listed as a TXT record at _dmarc.

Reopen the DNS settings screen after saving and confirm the TXT record at _dmarc is listed with the value typed, with no duplicate entry at the same host name.

A scan run in the first minutes after saving can read as absent while nothing is wrong, because a resolver somewhere is still handing out its cached answer from before the record existed. If the scan still reports no DMARC after a couple of hours, go back to the nameserver check at the top of this page first and the host name second.

A record saved into a console that isn’t answering DNS for the domain is the most common reason a scan comes back unchanged, and the fix is to add the same record at the company the nameservers point to.

When the scan shows the record and its policy, you’re in the monitoring stage. Nothing about delivery has changed yet, and the first reports take a day or so to arrive.

Tightening from none to reject

p=none leaves delivery as it was and starts the reports arriving. Those reports are the only evidence you’ll get about what sends as your domain: your mail provider, a newsletter tool, an invoicing system, and whatever else somebody connected two years ago. Each report names the sending server, how many messages it sent, and whether SPF and DKIM passed for them. The DMARC piece explains how to read one and what a failing row means.

Without a record, a receiver that sees a message fail both checks has no instruction from you, so most deliver it anyway and nobody tells you. Of the 316,600,902 domains carrying a grade in the September 2026 census, 238,156,049 (75.2%) have no DMARC record at all. The monitoring stage has its own trap: of the domains whose DMARC record carries p=none, 33,651,068 (80.33%) have no rua= address, so they sit at none collecting nothing that would let them move.

Read the reports until every sender you recognise is passing and the failing rows are ones you don’t. Then change p=none to p=quarantine in the same field you saved it in, wait for a further round of reports to confirm your own mail still lands, and change it to p=reject. That last edit is the one that turns a monitoring record into an instruction receivers act on, and it takes the same minute in the GoDaddy console as the first one did.

Figures as of 5 September 2026, from the September 2026 edition of the defaults.exposed census. Census numbers move every month; the current values are on the census data page.