Sorry, I guess I was unclear. When I was talking about adoption meant as 
verifiers, not signers.

I'm not concerned about unsigned messages. I'm concerned about verifying signed 
messages.

When a MUA syncs a message that has a DKIM signature, if there's no A-R header, 
the MUA has to do its own verification to know if that signature is valid. And 
even if there _is_ an A-R header, the MUA needs some mechanism to know it was 
actually inserted by the MDA.

- Phillip

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 29, 2025, at 5:40 PM, John R. Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 29 Aug 2025, Phillip Tao wrote:
>> Now, you could say that the MUA also has no way to know whether the mail 
>> provider correctly implements sending or receiving either, but I would argue 
>> that the difference is that those are core functions that have been defined 
>> and widely implemented for decades longer than either the DKIM or A-R RFCs 
>> have existed. As I'm sure you know, there is a very long tail of MTAs out in 
>> the wild. It's not unreasonable to imagine that there's a sizable portion of 
>> those which have not yet adopted DKIM or A-R headers.
> 
> Since it's basically impossible to get mail into Yahoo without a DKIM 
> signature, and pretty hard into Google or Outlook, I would be surprised if 
> there was an interesting amount of unsigned mail.  Perhaps we can ask people 
> we know at large providers what they see.  How much do you see at iCloud?
> 
> There are millions of VPS with preinstalled MTAs that don't have any 
> authentication configured, but since they send close to no mail, I don't see 
> why we would care.
> 
> Regards,
> John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for 
> Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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