Re: really to do with Re: WG Review: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (dmarc)

[Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]>]

On Tue 15/Jul/2014 19:22:57 +0200 Ned+ietf wrote:
> 
>> But it's not likely to have much to do with DMARC, anytime soon.
> 
> I've yet to see any evidence that anything being proposed will have
> any effect on DMARC in the short term. I've heard a bunch of
> assertions that if the need arose MTA changes can be rolled out
> quickly. I have 25+ years of experience doing this stuff that says
> otherwise.

I fully agree.  However, it is the converse statement --evidence that
DMARC will have any effect on reclaiming semantics of the most basic
protocol elements in email-- which is intriguing.

If you pardon my oversimplifying, recipient semantics is well
established by SMTP.  Defining the meaning of the domain requires DNS
write access, while the local part's meaning is local.  DMARC can be
seen as an attempt to reestablish the same in From:, conditioning
deliverability to its enforcement like in the previous case.

Thus far, DMARC is a private agreement which works reliably only with
direct mailing, where it is backed up by SPF.  DKIM is afflicted by a
fierce crowd of breakage forms, which nobody seems to be interested in
as they occur sporadically in the current use case.  The challenge is
to see its much trumpeted bet on multi-hop tolerance.  IMHO, there
lies the worthiness of the proposed WG.

Ale