Re: [dmarc-ietf] Report bombing is a prolem, Forensic report loops are not

[Douglas Foster <[e-mail]>]

Interesting point.

In your experience, how often does reporting produce any change in sender
behavior?

I have made attempts both to help senders correct their own SPF or DMARC
policy, or to get them to stop violating my DMARC policy.   As best I can
recall, my success rate has been zero.

For a responsive organization, finding a problem and getting the change
approved is likely to be a time-consuming a quick process.   A week
turnaround would seem timely, unless they go into emergency mode because
lots of mail is being blocked.

The spec is confusing because it says (a) failure reports should be sent
immediately, (b) failure reports should be aggregated, and (c) failure
reports should be throttled but without specifying a limit.

Of course, if the cause is a spammer, there is nothing that the domain
owner can do at all.

I wonder if the rule should be one message per week per source, since any
large volume sender will be getting reports from multiple sources.   The
main problem with this is that law enforcement actions may want to be
bombed.

DF



On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 4:00 PM John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:

> In article <[e-mail]> you write:
> >3.3.  Transport
> >
> >    Email streams carrying DMARC failure reports MUST conform to the
> >    DMARC mechanism, thereby resulting in an aligned "pass".  Special
> >    care must be taken of authentication, as failure to authenticate
> >    failure reports may provoke further reports.
>
>     Reporters SHOULD rate limit the number of failure reports sent
>     to any recipient to avoid overloading recipient systems.
>
>
> Why would reports due to a mail loop be more of a problem than due to
> some random spammer sending a lot of fake mail, or (real life) your
> users send mail to mailing lists with thousands of subscribers? Rate
> limit your reports, don't worry about where they came from.
>
> R's,
> John
>
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