There have been noticeable quirks with the method that Microsoft has
attempted ARC implementation (regarding outbound sealing).

For enterprise/business tenants, these customers have full control over
their mail routing (such as, say, sending outbound mail through a third
party spam filter or another service).

With this scenario, it is a common configuration to remove Office 365's SPF
include mechanism from a domain's SPF record; since O365 is no longer
directly sending mail to external receivers, the filter is now the last hop.
Additionally, as is common with this configuration, DKIM signing will also
be done at the edge with (not on office 365).

One can start to see the issue with this scenario. The Microsoft ARC set
added here will fail immediately upon application for these customers (and
there are an extremely large amount of tenants with this configuration),
and thus preventing further additions and any usefulness to the ARC by
receivers down the line (such as google) due to its immediate invalidity.

The argument can be made to simply, "keep O365 in a domain's SPF record",
to fix the ARC authentication in this scenario, but this is not a desired
configuration given that it is currently possible to create SPF aligned
mail from any Office 365 tenant using any domain desired (Outside of the
jurisdiction of the actual domain's tenant).

You don't see this issue with many other sealers currently because this is
only possible at the moment (as far as I know) with ARC sealers that give
complete control over a domain's egress mail routing, DNS, *and* also seal
ARC on egress mail. For example, this is not a problem for Zohomail, or
Microsoft consumer domains (Hotmail, MSN, live, outlook, etc.), who also
seal ARC on egress mail, because the customer does not control the domain
being sent from. There is no opportunity for this condition to occur.

Not to detract from their efforts towards its use, as it *does* work as
intended in expected inbound scenarios as-is currently in O365, but there
should definitely be more consideration given by ARC sealers as to when an
ARC set is applied. Possibly by giving sealing condition capabilities to
the customer?

- Mark Alley





On Fri, Mar 24, 2023, 6:18 PM Seth Blank <s...@sethblank.com> wrote:

> Microsoft is using ARC quite heavily, and has reported on this list and at
> M3AAWG of the impact it makes
>
> Microsoft even has on their public roadmap that tools are being built for
> their customers to enable per-customer sealers that they choose to trust:
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=dmarc
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 5:06 AM Steven M Jones <s...@crash.com> wrote:
>
>> On 3/24/23 3:48 AM, Douglas Foster wrote:
>> >
>> > Do we know if any entity other than Google is successfully using ARC
>> > as an evaluation tool?
>>
>>
>> FWIW: In late 2021 a "German company" reported that it was able to
>> "recover" about 10% of messages that had failed other authentication
>> checks by validating ARC.
>>
>> --S.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dmarc
>>
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