On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 5:00 PM Michael Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 12/13/22 6:35 AM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
>
>
> This tactic appears to me to have three problems: (1) negative reputations
> are of little value to receivers, because attackers can easily shed them;
> (2) if I have to remember everything with a negative reputation for some
> undetermined period of time, I now have a resource problem; (3) I can just
> not sign my mail, because maybe no reputation is better than a negative one.
>
> I don't understand #1. As in they can move to another service? Or what?
>
Right.  IP address gets a bad reputation?  Move to another one.  Domain
blocklisted?  Register another one.  etc.  Any bad reputation is trivially
exchanged for a neutral one.  That leaves us in a world where only positive
reputations are meaningful, and presumably once you have one you'll work to
protect it.

> As for 3, it's pretty easy to cons up a new domain with fresh neutral
> reputation and still enjoy the supposed benefit of mail being signed for
> awhile. If you factor SPF in though it probably gets harder because now you
> need not only a new domain, but the underlying network connectivity to
> avoid detection.
>
Yep, but if a receiver values DKIM more than SPF, for instance, then maybe
they're willing to forgive that lack of support.  Maybe the forwarding
problem bugs you enough that you're forced into such a position, for
instance.

>  Which brings up a question: even though they pass on DKIM they should
> fail on SPF, right? For transactional email that seems like a big old red
> flag, right?
>
Yes, but that doesn't work for all applications or flows.  It depends on
what tolerances work for your use case and your users.

> In both cases you need to keep track of both as somebody with a bad rep
> might get better and one with a good rep might get worse, right? That is,
> this isn't static. Preferential of course is pretty subjective. I suspect
> that most of these filters operate much like spamassassin which gives
> weights to various factors, so good and bad are both useful.
>

Sure but on my email, I would like you to have only positive signal, to the
extent I can control that.  Or, at least, as little negative signal as
possible.

-MSK
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