Defaults.Exposed

Set up DMARC on Squarespace

You want a DMARC record on Squarespace, 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.

Squarespace is the DNS host for this record, the place that holds the note. It is not the mailbox provider, so it has no DMARC value to hand over; the reader writes the record contents.

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

The record only takes effect if Squarespace answers DNS for the domain, which means the domain’s nameservers point to Squarespace. This is the case when the domain was registered with Squarespace, or an outside domain was connected and Squarespace was chosen to manage its DNS. Check the domain’s DNS and nameserver settings in the Squarespace account to confirm which applies. If the nameservers point to another company, the record has to be added at whichever provider runs DNS instead.

Squarespace publishes nothing about DMARC on its own. It only stores and serves the TXT record exactly as typed into the Host and Data fields; every part of the record’s content comes from the reader.

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 Squarespace console

  1. Sign in to Squarespace and open the Domains area.
  2. Click the domain that needs the record.
  3. Open its DNS settings, labelled DNS, DNS Settings, Advanced DNS or Custom Records depending on the account.
  4. Add a new custom DNS record and set the Type field to TXT.
  5. In the Host field, sometimes labelled Name, enter exactly _dmarc and nothing after it, since Squarespace appends the domain automatically.
  6. In the Data field, sometimes labelled Value, enter the record value with the reporting address replaced by a mailbox that is read.
  7. Save the record so it publishes.

Set Type to TXT. In the Host field, sometimes labelled Name, type _dmarc only, since Squarespace appends the domain name after it. In the Data field, sometimes labelled Value, paste the full record value starting v=DMARC1; with the rua=mailto: address replaced by a mailbox the reader checks. Squarespace’s DNS panel does not expose a separate TTL field for custom records.

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 Squarespace form

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 added in Squarespace can take a few minutes up to a couple of hours to take effect. The saved record appears back in the same DNS settings screen where it was added, listed among the domain’s other custom records.

Reopening the domain’s DNS settings in Squarespace and finding the _dmarc TXT record listed there confirms it saved, though only an external check confirms it resolves and reads correctly.

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 Squarespace 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.