Re: [dmarc-ietf] DMARCbis WGLC Issue 136 - DMARC Records Can Be CNAMEs

[Neil Anuskiewicz <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 16, 2024, at 9:38 AM, Scott Kitterman <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, March 16, 2024 4:52:54 AM EDT Tero Kivinen wrote:
>> John Levine writes:
>>> It appears that Todd Herr  <[e-mail]> said:
>>>> I agree that clarifying it can't hurt, obviously, ...
>>> 
>>> I disagree, it does hurt.
>>> 
>>> If we say you're allowed to use CNAMEs to point to DMARC records,
>>> people are to say uh oh, is there something special here? What about
>>> DKIM records? what about SPF records? how about SPF includes? or SPF
>>> redirects?
>>> 
>>> Really, there is nothing to say here, so let's not say it.
>> 
>> We could add an example Appendix B that uses CNAME, so that would give
>> indication, yes of course you can use CNAMEs, without explicitly
>> adding text that might cause confusion.
> 
> I think we have more important things to spend our time on.
> 
> Scott K
> 

I agree that CNAMES isn’t worth time or effort. From what I’ve seen it’s the larger ESP’s do this and they document it and they provide records to copy and paste from the auth settings into DNS. Then you go back and click a button and it lights up green. The sort of person who’s confused by the CNAME is the same person confused by a TXT record. I’m reading DMARCbis 30  now and things are looking good to me.

My only quibble is, so far, I’ve not seen a clear,  concise explanation of the general purpose domain. It’s not complicated but I think the idea is going to be new for a lot of people. Some people might misunderstand in less than useful ways as well.

Neil