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I've been tasked with setting up DKIM, SPF and DMARC for a business. I come from more of a development background, so as a result, I've been a bit confused on how to interpret the DMARC reports I'm seeing.

I'm using a DMARC report analyzer (DMARCreport), and it's showing some spam-y emails as DKIM aligned and DKIM verdict "pass". I don't understand how these emails are passing DKIM, since the only service that is set up to sign with DKIM is Google Workspace, and again these emails don't appear to be legitimate emails, and are also failing SPF.

Does "DKIM aligned" in the report mean simply that the From header matched the "d" domain value in the DKIM signature, or does it actually verify the keys using cryptography?

If it does actually cryptographically verify, any idea why I'm seeing spam-y emails showing as DKIM aligned?

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    There are a few possible explanations, and I believe each is answered already - please at the very least edit your question to include some unambiguous details about the situation you are facing, e.g. report excerpt. I think you are looking at messages where the signature was verified & aligned (DMARC is always about the combination of passing the check and the relationship to the claimed sender) meaning the message did originate from your authorized systems, but due to forwarding outside of your control you no longer recognize the reported sending network address.
    – anx
    Commented Mar 15, 2023 at 3:58
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    Does this answer your question? I don't understand DMARC reports regarding my policy
    – anx
    Commented Mar 15, 2023 at 4:01

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Since you have mentioned that Google workspace is your only authorized sender, this could be a case of email forwarding. When an email is forwarded, the original message is received by one email server and then re-sent to another email address. In this case, the forwarding server is sending the email on behalf of the original sender (Google workspace in your case), but using its own email server.

If the original sender has set up SPF and DKIM for their domain, it's possible that the forwarded email may fail SPF but pass DKIM.

SPF checks whether the IP address of the sending email server is authorized to send emails for the domain in the From header. In the case of forwarded emails, the email is being sent from the forwarding server, which is not authorized to send emails for the original sender's domain. Therefore, the SPF check may fail.

To confirm if these are forwarded emails you could check whether the selector of these emails are same as that of your authorised sender (google workspace)

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