[Mailman-Developers] DMARC discussions at IETF, WG likely to form

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Hi all,

For the past few weeks I've been participating in discussions of DMARC
at the IETF, and I thought I'd post an update as matters have taken a
somewhat optimistic turn there.  According to participants there, the
dmarc at ietf.org mailing list is the primary venue for discussion of
DMARC development-related topics at the moment (the list at dmarc.org
has been inactive for months).

Over the past few weeks a general consensus has developed that further
technology should be developed, which we hope will be adopted by
providers like AOL and Yahoo!, as well as by mailing lists and others
suffering from draconian DMARC policies.  To this end, a charter for
an IETF working group has been proposed, discussed, and will be
submitted to the IETF very soon.  The proposed charter is here:

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/appsawg/trac/wiki/DMARC

(I'm not sure if this is the original or how current it might be; only
a few suggestions for changes were received.)

Briefly, the DMARC protocol itself is considered "successful" as far
as it goes, so the current protocol is proposed for independent
publication by its current editors as an Informational RFC.  (Ie, this
is not part of the working group's function.)  I think this is
reasonable, as the DMARC Consortium can ignore any RFC they don't like.

The specific products of the working group that are planned are a Best
Current Practices RFC on implementation and deployment of DMARC tools,
and new experimental or standards-track RFCs aimed at providing
protocols for senders to designate authorized resenders (such as
mailing lists).  I don't know how soon the working group will be
formed, but I suppose some discussion will take place while we're
waiting for official word from the IETF.

Mailing list discussion of the charter, as well as the concrete
proposals received so far, can be found here:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?q=dmarc

Not directly related to the chartering process, but perhaps of
interest to Mailman-Developers, are the following documents.

The BCP draft is here:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-crocker-dmarc-bcp

Three proposals for third-party authorization:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kucherawy-dkim-delegate
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-levine-dkim-conditional
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-otis-tpa-label

(from simplest to most complex).

Regards,
Steve