DMARCdrift vs Postmark DMARC

Postmark's free DMARC tool is genuinely useful for one thing: getting a passive weekly update on your domain's authentication status without spending money or setting up an account. Point your `rua=` address at Postmark, and every Monday you get an email summarizing your top 10 sending sources. That's it. No dashboard you can open to investigate further. No alert if a new unauthorized source starts spoofing your domain on a Tuesday. No forensic report to trace which messages specifically failed. For initial DMARC awareness on a single personal domain, that's acceptable. For anything you're actively running — a SaaS, a newsletter, a business with more than one domain — the weekly-only window creates real blind spots.

Neither Postmark DMARC nor DMARC Digests (the paid product) sends real-time alerts. DMARCdrift fires alerts when your alignment rate drops below a threshold, when new unauthorized IPs appear sending mail from your domain, when your DMARC or SPF record changes unexpectedly, or when your SPF record starts approaching the DNS lookup limit. These are the things that matter — the signals that indicate your domain is drifting toward a spoofing vulnerability or that someone made an unintended DNS change. The weekly digest format means you might not find out about a spoofing campaign until 6 days after it started.

The free Postmark tool is free regardless of how many domains you add — because it only emails you, nothing more. But once you want a dashboard (via DMARC Digests), the $14/domain/month pricing adds up fast: 2 domains is $28/month, 5 domains is $70/month, 10 domains is $140/month. DMARCdrift Solo is $9/month flat for up to 15 domains with a proper dashboard, real-time alerts, forensic reports, and 180-day retention. For anyone managing more than a single domain with any active monitoring requirement, DMARCdrift is the more cost-effective path.

If you have one domain, want zero-cost DMARC awareness, and don't need to act on anything between weekly emails, the free Postmark tool is the right answer. It requires no account, no credit card, and no maintenance. It's the right entry point for someone who has just set up DMARC at `p=none` and wants to understand their mail stream before committing to a paid tool. DMARCdrift's free tier exists for the same reason, but if the weekly email alone satisfies you, there's no reason to go further.