I realized why the arguments about whether to require authentication on reports are pointless.

If you actually look at reports, for the most part the address sending the
report is not the recipient domain or anything like it.

For example, recent failure reports I got from solarwinds.com (yes, them) are about mail to cisp.co.za which was forwarded to spamexperts.com. Reports from seznam.cz are about mail to email.cz. Reports from manthorp.com are about mail to streamingco.net.

Aggregate reports don't even include the recipient domains, and tell me about sending IPs some of which are mine but most of which are not as mail bounces around through mailing lists and forwarders, or spammers just send spam with my domain on the From line.

As we all know, bad guys are at least as good at authentication as good guys, probably better. So if someone for some reason wanted to send me fake reports of either kind, they could send them with perfect DMARC alignment and they'd still be fake. If they report spam with one of my domains on the From line, there's no way at all to tell whether those reports are real. I can use heuristics to recognize mail my system actually sent that went through mailing lists I know about, but DKIM signing the reports wouldn't help.

So I suggest that we close tickets 98 and 99. They don't identify a real problem, and if they did. they wouldn't fix it.

Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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