On Tuesday, April 11, 2023 12:13:33 AM EDT Neil Anuskiewicz wrote:
> I’m a bit concerned that the document will discourage domain owners from
> working toward an enforcing policy. I’ve seen at least one person say that
> most domains don’t need to go to p=reject. I’ve seen all sorts of domains
> attacked? Granted, high profile domains or perceived lucrative targets will
> receive the most attention but threat actors absolutely do attack all sorts
> of organizations all the time.
> 
> Maybe I’ve misunderstood but I hope that no langue that could be construed
> as discouraging domain owners from moving toward an enforcing policy would
> be a mistake.

It all depends on the user base of the domain and the tradeoff between the 
benefits of having such a policy against the interoperability risks of having 
such a policy.

We absolutely should be discouraging blind adoption of policies that result in 
reduced utility for email.  For any domain that has non-transactional users, 
that takes work to assess the completeness of email authentication deployment, 
assess aggregate reporting to understand the likely effects of either 
p=quarantine or p=reject., and then evaluate the cost/benefit trade-offs 
associated with such policies.  That's a non-trivial set of work to do and 
it's not cost effective for all domains to do it.

Early in the deployment of SPF there was a similar push to deploy SPF records 
with -all (the SPF rough equivalent of p=reject).  A lot of people did it 
without thinking it through and there were significant side effects.  The 
community concluded that SPF Fail (due to the -all in the record matching) was 
not a sufficiently reliable indicator that mail should be rejected and largely 
stopped doing it.

Aggressively pushing DMARC p=reject on domains that aren't ready for it may 
well lead to a similar result.  Let's not.

Scott K


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