Re: [dmarc-ietf] ARC questions

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Mon, 23 November 2020 21:27 UTC

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Cleverness: some
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Subject: Re: [dmarc-ietf] ARC questions
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In article <e3d428f4-1a29-4c6f-4a31-96a24a347e54@gmail.com>,
Dave Crocker  <dcrocker@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I believe, though, that the intent of ARC is that it be scalable in 
>> ways that manual enumeration of known legit mailing lists and 
>> forwarders is not.
>
>"if you know which hosts are legit" buries an assumption that is 
>problematic, namely that you know who handled the message.  The fact
>that a message purports to be handled by a mailing list you trust does 
>not mean it actually was.

Pretty close, but not quite.

You know that a message came from a mailing list because you have your
list of IPs or DKIM signatures of lists you trust.

ARC deals with the problem that most list software forwards everything
with a subscriber's address on the From: line and does a lousy job of
spam filtering. The question is if the entity sending the message to
the list was who it purported to be. 

For example, if a message from a list fails DMARC alignment, but ARC
says it was aligned on the way in, it's likely a real message from a
subscriber. If it was unaligned on the way in, it's likely wpam.

R's,
John
-- 
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John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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