Subject: [dmarc-ietf] Ticket #85 - New Description for 'p' tag and values

From: Todd Herr <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2020 17:26:55 -0500

In the "Ticket #39" thread, Dave Crocker asserted the following about the
'p' tag and its values:

"The premise that an author domain owner can, in any way, direct the
message disposition decisions of a receiving system is simply false.
It's false to a level of silliness, if one adequately considers the
complete independence of the receiver from the domain owner.

The domain owner can, perhaps, express something about the owner's own
concerns for mail that fails dmarc, but that's different from saying
anything about the receiver's decisions about how to respond to those
expressed concerns.

That is, the language expressing the semantics should be changed to be, in
a sense, egocentric. How do I, the domain owner feel about (assess) the
meaning of a DMARC failure?"

Later in that same thread, he proposed the following as possible new
language for the description of the 'p' tag and values in section 6.3:

*p*: Domain Owner Assessment Policy (plain-text; REQUIRED for policy
records). Indicates the severity of concern the domain owner has, for mail
using its domain but not passing DMARC validation. Policy applies to the
domain queried and to subdomains, unless subdomain policy is explicitly
described using the "sp" tag. This tag is mandatory for policy records
only, but not for third-party reporting records (see Section 7.1
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7489#section-7.1>). Possible values are as
follows:

*none*: The Domain Owner offers no expression of concern.

*quarantine:* The Domain Owner considers such mail to be suspicious. It is
possible the mail is valid, although the failure creates a significant
concern.

*reject: *The Domain Owner considers all such failures to be a clear
indication that the use of the domain name is not valid.  See Section 10.3
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7489#section-10.3> for some discussion of
SMTP rejection methods and their implications.

I believe this to be worthy of its own dedicated ticket and discussion, and
so have created a ticket specifically for it.

-- 

*Todd Herr* | Sr. Technical Program Manager
*e:* [email-masked]
*p:* 703.220.4153

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