In anticipation of today's DMARC WG meeting, I want to highlight one of
the many important use cases. Specifically:
Use of "unrelated" outbound SMTP servers
Commercial email using free email address
Newspaper Sites
Reference wiki:
https://tools.ietf.org/wg/dmarc/trac/wiki/MilestoneOneWiki
Past discussion around these use cases assume the email author has control
of the domain they send email from.
While it may be true for the world's digital elite (i.e. us), it's not
true for everyone.
There are billion(s) of people who use "free" or very low cost hosting
services to provide email.
For many people, switching email providers is hard (or not an option).
If their mail bounces, they simply don't have the context to decipher
the difference between "mailbox non-existent" and "DMARC policy reject due
to non-alignment"
Most of the world does not have control over their sending domain.
Previous posts have suggested this is a small problem. I respectfully
disagree. We need to be focusing on # of users impacted, not percentage
of mail bounced.
Take the following example: My local PTO (Parent Teacher Organization).
They are a volunteer non-profit.
They have no time or expertise to deal with technical things like email
setup.
They can't ask the local school board for email mailbox (local policy,
bureaucracy , etc).
They have no $$, so they use a free mail service (
p...@dmarc-protected-mailservice.com)
When their mail provider switched to p=reject
They no longer can email some parents directly who used forwards
They no longer can reliably send emails via a 3rd party service provider
(ESP)
They no longer can reliably send update to community mailing list
servers
IMO, this is not the 1% use case. It's bigger, much bigger.
I don't claim to have all the answers.
Telling user like this one to change mail providers solves nothing in the
long term.
DKIM Forward signatures do have promise and solves some of the issues I've
listed above.
Ultimately, solving DMARC indirect flows for this user will get us very
close to solving indirect flows over the rest of the world.
-Sam
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