On Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at 9:06 PM Scott Kitterman <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On Friday, December 17, 2021 8:43:17 PM EST Tim Wicinski wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at 6:56 PM Douglas Foster <
> >
> > [email protected]> wrote:
> > > That is not my position, and I don't know how you drew that
> > > conclusion from those words.
> >
> > Then my mistake.
> >
> > > I do take the position that DMARC PASS means "This name correctly
> > > represents the stated domain", and NP=TRUE means "This name cannot
> > > represent the stated domain because the domain owner never uses that
> > > name".   I am willing to say that if NP=TRUE produces an accurate
> result,
> > > I
> > > will block the message and I can see no reason why anyone else would do
> > > otherwise.
> > >
> > > DMARC FAIL is an ambiguous result, which was your point.  DMARC PASS is
> > > not ambiguous.   NP=TRUE should be ambiguous if at all possible,
> otherwise
> > > it adds no value.
> > >
> > > But back to the actual topic:
> > > - Do you believe the NP test can be useful?  If so, for what purpose?
> > > - What is the optimal test to evaluate NP?  How did you reach that
> > > conclusion?
> >
> > I see the NP tag being useful for mid to large organizations that have a
> > regular amount of organizational change (mergers, acquisitions, etc).
> > A large mostly static organization will not deploy the np tag, because "p
> > == sp", where the domain tag = the subdomain tag.
> > Larger organizations deploying DMARC usually run into the problem of not
> > knowing all the mail flows from all the change, and they end up
> > with "p != sp" for some period of time.  In these cases, np is really
> > useful in preventing attack vectors using subdomains (log4j.example.com)
> > from
> > being used.
> >
> > I am sure there are folks who track DMARC record changes over time, but
> > back in mid 2020 I pulled a bunch of DMARC records of some alexa top 10K,
> > and noticed the number of domains where "p != sp".  Doing a quick pull of
> > those domains and checking now I see a number of them now show "p == sp",
> > which means they feel they have a better understanding of their mail
> > flows.
> >
> > I worked for a large organization which had to set "p != sp" for a period
> > of time as they understood things better. They are now a "p == sp"
> > organization now, which is good. But having the added bonus of blocking
> > invalid subdomains during that migration period I am sure would have
> > made folks feel better.
> >
> > (the other use case for the np tag is around TLDs and also the SLDs like
> > co.uk, and Scott is all over that).
>
> Actually .gov.uk.  I'd expect that .co.uk has similar challenges to what
> we'd
> expect with .com.


I knew I'd get something wrong.


>
> What you describe is something that was in my mind when we defined np=,
> despite
> the focus on PSD at the time.  I think that np= has potentially broad
> utility
> as a gap filler during the deployment process for large organizations.
>

As an operations person who has worked with a lot of technical debt, when I
saw your idea
for np=, *all* I could think of was large organizational issues.

>
> I think p=reject will be a problem of a lot of organizations for a long
> time,
> so I think anything we can do to make it easier to have some set of mail
> covered by a reject policy is a good thing.
>

Here is a data point on this.  Sometime back in Fall 2020, I was collecting
some DMARC DNS records.
I was using the alexa-top* lists, which are horrible datasets, because
web domains don't always send email
and email domains don't have web properties etc.

Using the top-1000 domains:

1000 domains
 562 domains with DMARC record
 318 domains with DMARC record where p != sp

Rechecking that same list of domains last night:

  371 domains with DMARC record where p != sp

53 domains from this list updated their policies.  I did not dive into the
specifics, but they mostly appear
to have the 'p=' move forward (none->quarantine->reject) while 'sp='
appeared to stay the same.
(I see a few where 'p=' moves to reject and 'sp=' moves to none. I can
figure this out if interested)

To Scotts' point on organizations moving to p=reject will take time, I
would agree.  But allowing a large organization
allow sp=none but np=reject is a huge help.  (This also means organizations
need to cull the DNS data, but some of us
are a bit too obsessive about this)

tim
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