How to set up DMARC on Google Workspace

You want a DMARC record on Google Workspace, 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.

Google Workspace runs the domain’s mail, sending and receiving through Gmail. It has no DMARC setting anywhere in its Admin console, so the record has to be added at whoever runs the domain’s DNS instead.

The record comes first on this page, with what each part of it means, and the exact Google Workspace 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 Google Workspace answers DNS for the domain

Google Workspace is the mailbox provider here, not the DNS host, so there is no Google console screen to check for this record. Confirm which company runs the domain’s DNS by checking the Nameservers section in the registrar account, or by asking whoever set up the website, and publish the record in that company’s DNS settings.

Google Workspace publishes nothing for this record on its own. It generates none of the values, opens no matching screen, and leaves the whole record, its host name and its reporting address, to be typed by the reader at their DNS host.

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 Google Workspace console

Sign in to the DNS host for the domain, which is the registrar, web host or DNS provider, and not the Google Admin console.
Open the DNS settings for the domain, looking for a menu labelled DNS, Records or Advanced DNS.
Add a new record and choose the type TXT from the record type list.
In the Name or Host field, enter exactly _dmarc, including the leading _ character.
Do not type _dmarc.yourdomain.com in that field, because the DNS host appends the domain automatically.
In the Value or Content field, paste v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:[email protected], replacing the email with a real address that is monitored.
Leave the TTL field at the DNS host’s default setting.
Save the record so it publishes.

Set the record type to TXT. In the Name or Host field type _dmarc on its own, with the leading _ character, since the DNS host appends the domain automatically rather than needing _dmarc.yourdomain.com written out. In the Value or Content field paste the DMARC string plain, with the rua address changed to a mailbox that is read. Leave TTL at the DNS host’s default.

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 Google Workspace form

The record is not found by hunting through Google’s Admin console, because Google Workspace has no DMARC control; the record belongs in the DNS zone the domain’s nameservers point at.
Leaving off the _ character on _dmarc, or typing the full domain after it, puts the record at the wrong host name and DMARC will not be found there.
Most DNS hosts add the surrounding quoting to a TXT value automatically, so the string should be pasted plain rather than wrapped in quotation marks by hand.
There should be exactly one TXT record at _dmarc; if one already exists, edit it rather than adding a second.
The rua address has to be a mailbox the reader can receive at and does read, since it is where the aggregate reports arrive.
Publishing this record before SPF and DKIM are working can get the domain’s own legitimate mail blocked, which is why the policy starts at p=none.

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

The change takes effect at the DNS host, from minutes up to a couple of hours, and the saved record appears back in that DNS host’s own records list rather than anywhere inside Google Workspace.

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 Google Workspace 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.