ARC Record Checker
Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) preserves email authentication results across forwarding services.
What is ARC Record Checker?
How it Works
When an email passes through a forwarding server, that server cryptographically signs the existing authentication results and encapsulates them in new "ARC" headers. The final receiving server can then verify the ARC chain and trust the original results, even if the forwarder altered the message body.
Key Use Cases
Ensuring DMARC compliance when participating in mailing lists.
Fixing deliverability issues caused by university or corporate email forwarding rules.
Maintaining cryptographic trust across complex mail routing architectures.
Advanced Details
Cybersecurity Pros & Cons
Security Advantages
- Preserves the original authentication chain across forwarders, preventing legitimate emails from being incorrectly quarantined.
- ARC seals create a cryptographically verifiable audit trail of every intermediate server that handled the message.
- Enables DMARC enforcement even in complex forwarding scenarios without causing collateral legitimate email blocking.
- Intermediary ARC signatures can be used during incident response to trace an email's exact routing path.
Security Limitations
- ARC relies on the trustworthiness of intermediate forwarders — a compromised forwarder can generate fraudulent ARC seals.
- Widespread adoption is still limited, so many receiving servers ignore ARC headers entirely.
- ARC does not prevent a sophisticated attacker from replaying an old signed ARC chain with a new malicious payload.
- Complex ARC chain validation is error-prone to implement, and misconfigurations may inadvertently whitelist spoofed mail.
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