I asked this question because I have concluded that NP is only meaningful
for registrar policy records, to identify unregistered organizations.

For subdomains of registered organizations, SP=reject protects both
existent and non-existent domains.  This means that a NP policy would only
be relevant when sp=none and np=reject.    However, we can assume that a
malicious impersonator will make an intelligent choice among his options,
based on what he perceives as most likely to succeed.   That order of
priority would reasonably be:   organization, mail-sending subdomain,
non-mail but existent subdomain, and finally, non-existent subdomain.

At the same time, it is difficult to assume that any
theoretical expectation will remain valid across many spammers and billions
of messages.   In my limited study, I only see non-existent subdomains used
for legitimate mail.   Since no one has submitted evidence to the contrary,
I feel emboldened that my theory may indeed be correct.   If non-existent
subdomains of legitimate organizations are being impersonated on a scale
worthy of checking every message, I would expect that we could find
evidence of it.

Google and Microsoft have not weighed in, however.  I wish they would,

Doug

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 7:07 AM Douglas Foster <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I am looking for data about a particular type of non-existent domain.
>
> The PSD spec addresses the problem of non-existent organizations.
> Evaluators could extend that initiative by using the PSL to check for any
> non-existent organization domain, without limiting the test to DMARC
> participating registrars.
>
> What about non-existent subdomains of existent organizations?    We
> certainly could define a special test for this situation, but would it be
> useful?
>
> Can someone produce evidence of a spammer using an RFC53322.FROM address
> for a non-existent subdomain of a registered domain, on at least one
> message?    It would be interesting to also know the DMARC policy that
> applied to the message, if available.
>
> Doug Foster
>
>
_______________________________________________
dmarc mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dmarc

Reply via email to