On 5/6/2021 8:02 PM, Douglas Foster wrote:
I have begun data collection on the effectiveness of the MX and A tests. Wildcard DNS entries increase the frequency of false positives and reduce the usability of the test. For example, "msaqq189.ford.com <http://msaqq189.ford.com>" returns a set of MX results, but I rather doubt that I made a lucky guess and found a mail domain that Ford Motor actually uses.

You are adding an human element to this that doesn't exist.

At best, all you can do is enforce the protocol requirements, the MUST semantics for sure, the SHOULD, most of the time (it is not a MUST) and the possible MAYS. You have to be ready for all that independent of reputation.

The beauty of the DKIM Policy-based Model that began with DomainKeys, extended with DKIM which included SSP, reduced to ADSP when splitting SSP from DKIM-BASE, then abandoned and now DMARC which brought it back to life by adding Reporting, is the DOMAIN now giving the world a hint about its operations.

DMARC is very limited to three policies: reject, quarantine & none.

Reject and Quarantine is equivalent to an exclusive, restrictive policy which gives SMTP transport rejection authorization. Otherwise, you did nothing with a "none" policy.

There are the protocol rules. The restrictive policies has alignment rules and there are procedures to getting to these results, like lookup DNS requirements.

Independent of DMARC, MX is a SHOULD for a domain, you can still send mail to a domain that does not have MX records. AAAA is obviously a SHOULD because not everyone is TCP6 ready. Everyone is not going to have a DMARC record, nor a DKIM record. SSP, ADSP and now DMARC are the only way to get a DOMAIN policy above and beyond standard SMTP. SPF is also an extension to SMTP with its own independent requirements that DMARC MUST match.

So whats the easiest for a domain not to have any trouble with any of this?

Don't support it. Don't pretend to support it. Just ignore SPF, DKIM and its add-ons.

SMTP Receivers are not at a point where we can enforce what may not exist - a domain policy extractable at two points:

SMTP.MAIL FROM:  for SPF
SMTP.DATA.FROM: for DMARC

I have proposed that we exploit the SUBMITTER protocol and optimized this high overhead protocol, by passing the 5322.FROM field to the MAIL FROM: line

MAIL FROM:<return-path>  submitter=5322.from


Now SMTP has the ability to check for the DMARC policy to see how strong SPF SHOULD be and if its fails or not.

This will allow for the short circuiting and optimization of MAIL data I/O which today is increasingly getting larger with multi-media data transfer.


--
Hector Santos,
https://secure.santronics.com
https://twitter.com/hectorsantos



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