Yahoo DMARC breakage

Thu Apr 10 00:25:55 UTC 2014

Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 4/9/2014 3:05 PM, John Levine wrote:
>> In article <5345831B.4030705 at dcrocker.net> you write:
>>> Their implementation is not 'broken'.
>>
>> I'd say it's pretty badly broken if Yahoo intends for their web mail
>> to continue to be a general purpose mail system for consumers. If
>> they want to make it something else, that's certainly their right, but
>> it would have been nice if they'd given us some advance warning so we
>> could take the yahoo.com addresses off our lists.
>
>
> If I point a gun at you, and pull the trigger, but maybe shouldn't 
> have done that, the gun is not broken.
>
> Management decisions that are subject to criticism does not represent 
> erroneous performance by the folks tasked with doing the task mandated.
>
> Everything they are doing is "legal".
>
> Your (possibly entirely valid) assessment that their action is 
> ill-advised or unpleasant does not equal broken.

Well, sort of - given that DMARC is still an Internet draft, not even an 
experimental standard.  Maybe it's doing what the draft says it is - but 
it's an alpha-level protocol, that breaks a lot of things it touches.  
If not "broken" it's certainly "not ready for prime time" - and large 
scale deployment is akin to a DDoS attack - i.e., not "ill-advised" but 
verging on criminal.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra