DMARCER checks every domain regularly in the background, but you will often want fresh results straight after publishing a DNS change, rather than waiting for the next scheduled check. Recheck now tells DMARCER to look at the domain again right away, run all of its checks against your live DNS, and update everything you see in Domain Management. The check only reads: it looks up your DNS and records what it finds, but it never publishes records and never removes anything.
What Recheck now does
A full re-check looks again at every signal DMARCER tracks for the domain, all in one go, rather than just a single record. Each one is looked up live, so there is no delay from old results being cached on our side.
- Ownership validation (the verification TXT record). A re-check can confirm ownership, but it will never un-verify a domain that was already verified.
- SPF, DMARC and DNSSEC records.
- Domain registration and nameserver details.
- Every known DKIM selector for the domain.
- MTA-STS and TLS-RPT (checked once the domain's ownership has been verified).
- The compliance checks, so any warning you have just fixed can clear without waiting for the next scheduled check.
When the checks finish, DMARCER re-scores the domain there and then, so the Domain Security Score, the per-customer summary and the tenant Overview show the new state immediately, rather than waiting for the next scheduled scoring run.
Re-checking a single domain
- Open Domain Management and find the domain in the grid.
- Open the row's actions menu (the three-dot menu at the end of the row) and choose Recheck now.
- A short Rechecking your domain dialog appears while the live checks run.
- When it finishes, the grid refreshes and a message confirms Recheck complete. The status icons (SPF, DMARC, DNSSEC, MTA-STS) and the security score update in place.
When you publish a record from inside DMARCER (for example confirming a DMARC change or publishing an MTA-STS policy), a re-check runs for you automatically, so the icon updates as soon as the new record is live.
Re-checking several domains at once
To refresh several domains together, tick the rows you want in the Domain Management grid, open Bulk actions and choose Recheck selected. You will be asked to confirm, because each domain runs the full set of checks (ownership, SPF, DMARC, DNSSEC, registration and nameservers). A progress panel in the corner shows how far through the run is.
Bulk re-checks run one domain after another, so a large selection can take a few minutes. If a single domain fails (for example a brief DNS timeout), the run carries on, and the final message tells you how many succeeded and how many failed.
Re-checking just one signal
If you only want to re-check one thing, there are focused buttons that do the same live, read-only lookup for a single signal:
- Recheck Now in the Verify Domain Ownership dialog, after you have published the verification TXT record.
- Recheck now in the MTA-STS and TLS-RPT panel, to move the TLS-RPT chip from Awaiting to Published once the _smtp._tls TXT record is live.
- The Recheck DNS control in the DKIM selector window, to re-check the domain's selectors after you have added or changed one.
What happens to alerts and the audit log
A re-check adds an audit log entry recording that it ran and what it changed. If the fresh results bring up new problems (for example more than one SPF record, an SPF setup error that makes receivers treat SPF as broken, lost DNSSEC or lost ownership), the matching alerts are sent straight away to the Alerts queue, by email and to any connected PSA, instead of waiting for the next alerting cycle. In the same way, any issues you have just resolved are closed off in the same pass.
Common pitfalls
- The change still is not showing. DMARCER reads your live DNS with nothing cached on our side, but your DNS provider and the wider internet still need time to spread a new or edited record. Wait a little and re-check again.
- You cannot see Recheck now. Re-checking looks up live DNS and saves the results, so it is only available to users with domain management rights. Read-only (viewer) users will not see the option.
- It will not remove ownership. A re-check only confirms ownership; it never un-verifies a domain that was already verified, so a brief DNS hiccup cannot knock a domain out of its verified state.
- MTA-STS looks unchecked. MTA-STS and TLS-RPT are only re-checked once the domain's ownership is verified. Verify ownership first, then re-check.
- Re-check appears to do nothing to the score. The score is worked out again as part of the re-check, but it only moves if a tracked signal has actually changed. If you expected a different score, double-check that the underlying record really is live in DNS.