responding to DMARC breakage

Sat Apr 12 22:12:10 UTC 2014

On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 5:56 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
> On 4/12/2014 2:38 PM, Jim Popovitch wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Miles Fidelman
>> <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
>>     someone needs to get a legal opinion wrt
>> the DMARC group's effort to have all mailinglists change their From:
>> address.
>
>
>
> "The DMARC group" (presumably referring to the dmarc.org informal consortium
> that created DMARC) is conducting no such effort.
>
> The action taken this past week was an independent effort by Yahoo.
>
> dmarc.org had nothing to do with it.

I wasn't writing about their website, rather the motivations of the
core participants of the DMARC spec (that hang out around that
website).   If you haven't been paying attention all along, it's easy
to miss the changes from the original DMARC objectives.  Sometime
after the first draft, DMARC went from only being for transactional
email (i.e. behind the scenes stuff), to full blown end-all of spam
with DMARC appearing on every tech blog and even CNN.  That train's
been barreling down the track for some time now.

I posted this earlier, but for refresher:

Go here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kucherawy-dmarc-base/
Notice the early versions of the spec contained the word
"transactional", notice the current version has it removed.   Also
notice that (at the point of change) one of the authors is from Yahoo!.

What Yahoo! did wasn't a fluke, nor independent happenstance, it's
part of a much bigger and broader picture.

The ironic thing is that rather than go the IETF way (a fair amount of
the DMARC folk are past IETF contributors), the decision was made to
not seek peer consensus, nor to invalidate conflicting RFCs.  An end
run.

-Jim P.