Client portal
The client portal is a simplified, read-only view of dotMARC for your clients. Instead of the dashboard your team uses, a client contact signs in at the same dotMARC address and sees a short summary of their own domains, in your brand (or their own, if you set one for their Group). There are no menus, settings or buttons that change anything.
Turning it on for someone
The portal is a switch on an access grant, so it's set per person:
- Open Manage > Access and grant the client contact access by email, as usual.
- Give the grant a role that can be limited to Groups (such as Viewer) and select the client's Groups.
- Turn on the grant's Client portal switch.
The switch is refused for a grant that isn't limited to Groups, because a portal user must only ever see their own domains. For the same reason, you can't remove the last Group from a grant while its portal switch is on.
Once it's on, that person only ever sees the portal. Opening any other dotMARC page sends them back to it, and they can't use the API. Turn the switch off to give them the normal dotMARC view instead.
See Permissions & Access for how roles and Group-scoped grants work.
What clients see
Your domains lists every domain in the client's Groups, with an overall verdict at the top and, for each domain, a status, the reasons behind it, the DMARC pass rate over the last 30 days with a small trend line, and how many alerts are open.
Each domain has one of four statuses:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Protected | The DMARC policy rejects or quarantines failing mail, and every health check passes. |
| Monitoring only | The DMARC policy only reports, so mail spoofing the domain isn't blocked yet. |
| Needs attention | A health check is failing or an alert is open. The reasons are listed under the status. |
| No reports yet | No DMARC reports have arrived. They usually start within a few days of adding a domain. |
Opening a domain shows its page:
- Policy: what happens to mail that fails DMARC, in plain words.
- Health: the DMARC, DMARC reporting, SPF, MX, DKIM, TLS reporting and (when set up) MTA-STS checks.
- Who sends as this domain: the busiest senders reported in the last 30 days, whether they passed SPF and DKIM, and what receivers did with their mail.
- Alerts: alerts from the last 30 days, open or resolved.
Clients can switch between light and dark mode and sign out. They can't fix, push, recheck or configure anything, and they never see other clients' domains, your team's pages or the API.
Branding
Open Manage > Branding to set how the portal looks:
- Product name: your name for the portal. It's shown in the app bar when there's no logo, in page titles, and as the heading for a client with several Groups.
- Light mode and Dark mode each have a primary colour (links, buttons and highlights) and a secondary colour (headings, the pass rate line, footer links and neutral statuses such as "Monitoring only", and light mode's app bar). Client reports use the light colours: the primary for the title, the secondary for section headings and table headers.
- Dark colours start automatic: the light colour, lightened until it's easy to read on dark mode's cards. Pick one to use your own, or Use automatic to go back.
- Advanced: backgrounds sets the page and card colours for each mode, for every client. Dark mode's app bar is a step darker than its page colour.
- Logo and Dark logo: PNG, JPEG or SVG, up to 512 KB. A wide logo about 40 pixels tall works best. The logo is for light backgrounds and the dark logo for dark ones. The dark logo is shown whenever the app bar is dark: in dark mode (unless you've made dark mode's page colour light), and in light mode when your secondary colour is dark. Without a dark logo, the logo is used everywhere.
- Support email, Support URL, Support phone and Footer text: shown at the foot of every portal page so clients know how to reach you.
Each colour shows its contrast rating against the page and cards it sits on, using WCAG's levels: AAA (7 to 1 or more), AA (4.5 to 1, the usual target for text), and AA large text only (3 to 1, fine for headings but not body text). A background shows how readable normal text is on it. A colour below AA can still be saved, so you can use a brand's official colours, but text in it may be hard for some people to read. The preview below the form shows the portal in light and dark mode with your unsaved changes.
SVG logos are checked when you upload them. An SVG that contains scripts, event handlers or links to anything outside the file is refused, since the portal is shown to people outside your business.
Branding a Group
On Manage groups, the Branding button on each Group sets that client's own display name, logo, dark logo, and light and dark colours. Anything left empty uses your brand, and a Group with its own branding shows a Branded chip. A Group's dark colours left empty are automatic from its own light colours; if it has no light colours of its own, it uses yours. Backgrounds are always yours.
When a portal user's grant covers several Groups:
- If exactly one of their Groups has its own branding, that branding is used.
- If two or more have their own branding, none wins, so your brand is used.
- The heading is the Group's display name (or its name) when they have one Group, and your product name when they have several.
Previewing as a client
The Group branding dialog has a Preview as client link that opens /portal/preview/<group id>: the portal exactly
as that Group's clients see it, with a banner saying it's a preview. You need permission to manage Groups to use it,
and staff limited to some Groups can only preview those.
Send clients a regular report too: see Client reports.