[ih] DMARC [was "Father of e-Marketing"]

[Bernie Cosell]

On 5 Jun 2019 at 18:32, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

> Short answer: there is no engineering effort that will succeed trying
> to
> make that happen (*cough* IPv6 *cough*)

That reminds me: what happened to the IPv4 apocalypse?  Is there a plan, yet, for 
phasing out IPv4?

> .... you solve nothing, unless your theoretical
> gateway can magically figure out the bad guys and block them. Which,
> in
> practice, is what's already been done with tools like DMARC but
> backported into butressing SMTP,

I've gotten confused about this DMARC.  I didn't think it had *anything* to do 
with blocking bad guys, but little more than protecting the "reputation" of the 
good guys.  That is, the only thing I can see that it does is prevent the bad guys 
from "masquerading" as a good guy, but that only leaves about 200 million other 
source-host-names they can forge to [or with cooperative registries, crank out 
new, similar-to-real host-sounding host names ad infinitum.   It makes life easier 
for some of the ISPs that used to look like _they_ were sending spam, but it 
doesn't seem to affect the spammers.

And it has the side effect of kinda breaking mailing lists [as we discovered with 
Vint's email].  Help me understand how DMARC slows down the bad guys.

  /Bernie\

            Bernie Cosell
       bernie at fantasyfarm.com
-- Too many people; too few sheep --