Incoming SMTP in the year 2017 and absence of DKIM

Wed Nov 29 22:09:40 UTC 2017

Not old enough to have had an Executive Secretary processing your incoming snail-mail before it gets to you?

The "envelope" in which a letter arrived is just as important as the letter itself and contains valuable information that is duplicated in e-mail -- the postmark (received headers), the return address (mail from); and, the delivery address (mail to).

It was an offense to discard the envelope in which correspondence arrived since it is used to determine the validity of the snail mail.

Current e-mail clients are comparable to having a secretary that throws out the envelope and snips off most of the inside addressing information and delivers only the heavily redacted letter so that no determination of its validity is possible.

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The fact that there's a Highway to Hell but only a Stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic volume.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of John Levine
>Sent: Wednesday, 29 November, 2017 14:28
>To: nanog at nanog.org
>Subject: Re: Incoming SMTP in the year 2017 and absence of DKIM
>
>In article <20171129183535.GB18534 at UCSD.Edu> you write:
>>As I see it, the problem isn't with DKIM, it's with the
>>implementation of DMARC and other such filters.  Almost all
>>of them TEST THE WRONG FROM ADDRESS.  They compare the Author's
>>address (the header From: line) instead of the Sender's address,
>
>Sigh.  I have my differences with the people who designed DMARC but
>they are not stupid and they really do understand the relevant RFCs.
>Some of them even wrote some of those RFCs.
>
>The reason they look at the From: line is that's the one recipients
>see.  The Sender: header was a nice idea but in practice, it's not
>useful.
>
>R's,
>John