How to fix “Mail Check retired” from UK NCSC

Your organisation relied on NCSC Mail Check for DMARC reporting — the service was fully retired on 31 March 2026, and the reports and dashboards are gone.

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What this means

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre retired Mail Check (and Web Check), explicitly recommending that organisations move to commercial DMARC monitoring. Around 17,000 UK public-sector organisations — schools, councils, trusts, small public bodies — lost their free aggregate-report visibility, while UK government guidance still requires DMARC on public-sector email.

How to fix it

Step 1. Point your DMARC rua= tag at a replacement monitoring service — until you do, nobody is reading your reports and new sending problems go unnoticed.
Step 2. Keep the policy you already reached: Mail Check's retirement changes nothing about your DMARC record itself.
Step 3. If you're still at p=none, use the fresh reports to finish the journey to p=reject — that was always the point of collecting them.
Step 4. For small organisations, a free weekly digest (like DMARCKeeper's free tier) is often enough to stay compliant with the monitoring intent of the guidance.

Frequently asked

How long until fixes take effect?

DNS changes propagate within minutes to 48 hours. Mailbox providers pick up the new records on their next check — most senders see bounces stop within a day of correct configuration.

Does this apply if I send fewer than 5,000 emails a day?

Formal enforcement targets bulk senders, but partial authentication already costs you inbox placement at every volume — and spoofing protection matters regardless of how much you send.

Can I just ask my hosting provider to fix it?

Hosting support can add DNS records for you, but they don't know which services send as your domain. You (or a monitoring tool reading your DMARC reports) have to provide that list — that's the actual hard part.

Don't want to babysit DNS records?
DMARCKeeper monitors your reports, names every sender, and walks you to full p=reject protection.
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