[This email is part of the series described here: 
https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/dmarc/current/msg03671.html]
 
Background: Mail.Ru is an early adopter of DMARC -- implementing the technical 
specification as part of the pre-public pilot group. As the largest provider of 
email in Russia, Mail.Ru sees a lot of spoofed email and maintains a strong 
desire to improve the state of email. From Mail.Ru’s  perspective, .COM email 
is almost all spam… outside of RU, email from .RU is typically spam. DMARC has 
been very useful in identifying real email to help with this problem. While 
DMARC is mostly positioned as a protection against phishing, in case of Mail.Ru 
primary reason to implement DMARC was protection against spam/secondary spam 
and improve deliverability, because regional domains like .ru are often 
blacklisted outside of Russia due to high spam/ham values. Fraud is also an 
issue. To cut down on fraud, Mail.Ru works with business and government 
organizations to implement DMARC. For example, Russian Federa Tax Service sees 
a lot of phishing; Mail.Ru worked with them to protect domain from abuse.
 
Vladimir Dubrovin is a Mail.Ru technical advisor and heads up DMARC 
implementation for last few years. Mail.Ru acts as a resource to push DMARC 
adoption within Russia.
 
Experience: DMARC used at Mail.Ru for its own domains and also inbound 
processing/filtering.
 
Filtering: No significant issues aside from typical issues related to dealing 
with large amounts of traffic. In the beginning, very little impact from 
adopting DMARC due to little global adoption, now it is widely used. There are 
exceptions that must be maintained, though. EG, because Mail.Ru has been around 
for a long time, we see lots of older traffic going through forwarding/lists. 
Exceptions-lists originally constructed by analyzing log files and based on 
user’s reports. We inspect message types and apply exceptions where it makes 
sense. Messages from ESPs with broken DMARC are not accepted for domain with 
DMARC reject policies due to the nature of the email flows - they do not flow 
through mailing lists for example.
 
If users report problems regarding mailing lists, we can add exceptions for the 
problem. This does not happen very often… maybe ½ a year ago something was 
added. Exceptions added apply to all users.
 
Exceptions are keyed off of DKIM signature and IP. In the future we’ll add 
support for ARC but it will be treated just like DKIM+IP exceptions… no 
expected improvements except for very unusual circumstances.
 
It is not unusual to received malformed email that is legitimate. Typically we 
show users a warning if the email might have been spoofed. Attacks based on 
malformed email (Misformed of multiple From: headers, eg) are common.. as are 
emails that are legitimate but sent through a convoluted path. Also homograph 
attacks from non-existant domains.. we display warnings to users via our 
web-based interface. We also indicate the failure via Authentication-Results to 
provide an information for MUA, but we do not know of any email clients that 
render authentication results outside of web-based interfaces.
 
Exim-based SPF and DKIM implementations: No issues today. Exim has a DKIM bug 
where multiple signatures from same domain with 1 valid and 1 broken didn’t 
work. Fixed internally and submitted a patch to exim.
 
A Mail.RU-hosted short DKIM key was discovered and fixed. Even though the DKIM 
key was unused, criminals could exploit it. In the filtering context, currently 
not collecting statistics if senders are using weak keys… DKIM adoption 
happened fairly late in Russia and so existing implementations are almost all 
1024 or greater in RU. Haven’t (yet!) seen cases where weak keys are exploited. 
Balance for us is between possibility of exploit vs working with today’s 
environment.
 
For SPF, we ignore “+all” policies that abusers like to use, and might add 
negative weight to such SPF records. Tricky because some records are 
effectively “+all” but using huge netblocks. For this reason, anti-spam layer 
improved to process SPF record in addition to SPF results (results are 
validated by MTA).
 
Filtering for business users is the same for freemail users. Freemail users are 
protected by mail.ru DMARC policy, but business users’ domains are not 
automatically given DMARC policy. In business administration panel, a mark is 
given in the UI to indicate problems with SPF and DKIM, DMARC record 
constructor is under development. 
 
Today in our web interface, warnings of suspicious email are only displayed if 
DMARC record is in place. In near future, warnings will be displayed even if 
DMARC record is not in place, starting if messages fails any authentication 
(e.g. SPF). We’ll end by displaying warnings if email lacks authentication for 
domains that are present in an email. Sensitive email such as from a banks are 
given special treatment/display.
 
Reporting: only aggregate reports are sent. Forensic reports are not generated 
due to conflict with law, which requires recipients to initiate information 
sharing. In this way our spam-reporting FBL is possible as users hit “this is 
spam” which is interpreted to mean “share with sender that this email is not 
wanted”. Exceptions to the law are difficult to obtain and so AFRF reports 
cannot be sent. Might change in future to send AFRF-style reports to a sub-set 
of trusted parties if recipients give permission to have AFRF generated.
 
Currently, XML report generation is relatively simple, and despite of the huge 
number of reports, all reporting is done by a single host. As DMARC popularity 
increases, we’ll have to grow the infrastructure that produces reports. No 
immediate need to upgrade this infrastructure.
 
Contact information is in each XML report: email box is monitored and active. 
Support helps companies with DMARC implementation and handles inquires related 
to SPF, DKIM, authentication, and DMARC.

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