Re: [dmarc-ietf] Next draft concerns

[Les Barstow <[e-mail]>]

Thank you for the history fill-in, John. That does at least explain why we’re here and not somewhere else.

I will respectfully disagree that the “psd” tree walk standard is well-defined based on the remainder of my response – that the use of the “psd” TLA for the tag is unfortunate/misleading and that more specificity is desirable. But having the alternatives eliminated at least gets me to “it should be in this spec”.

On Thursday, June 9, 2022, John Levine wrote:



It appears that Les Barstow  <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> said:

>-=-=-=-=-=-

>[Strong opinion follows]

>

>IMO [from April], determination of a DMARC authority boundary (registrar, PSD+1, private registry (+1), or internal subdomain

>boundary) should really be done outside of the DMARC standard altogether – a separate DNS lookup not dependent or centered

>around DMARC, and one flexible enough to respond with indications of various levels of authority. It is useful for

>decentralizing other queries beyond just DMARC (e.g. determining an appropriate WHOIS TLD for lookup). Unfortunately, here we

>are at draft 8 of the new DMARC standard and we have nothing to use as a sidecar mechanism.



The DBOUND working group already tried and failed to come up with a

general way to publish DNS boundaries, so we're not going back there.



>Is there a driving need to have this in the standard NOW?



Yes, of course. The point of writing a standard is to tell people what

to do to interoperate. The current underspecified fudge which winks at

the PSL has well known issues since, among other things, the people

who run the PSL have made it quite clear that it's not designed to

make DMARC work. It contains plenty of entries which make sense for

web cookies but not for DMARC.



The tree walk is well specified and doesn't depend on third parties

who aren't interested in what we want or need.



R's,

John