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[ietf-dkim] Another take on "all email from us is dkim signed"

2009-03-11 15:42:31
It seems to me that the domains likely to benefit from the ability to  
state "All email we send is DKIM signed" share a few things in common.

   1. They're concerned about other people sending email claiming to  
be "from" the domain.

   2. They send email using the domain to, typically, a large number  
of B2C recipients (excluding the null assertion "we send no email",  
which can be handled in other ways)

   3. All the email they send is DKIM signed.

   4. They primarily care about mail appearing to be "from" their  
domain being sent to users who also legitimately receive real email  
from them.

It also seems that the number of domains who want this will likely be  
a small fraction of the total number of domains, and likely a small  
fraction of the number of emails sent.

The combination of 2, 3 and 4 means that any receiving ISP that  
receives "forged" email that the domain cares about will also receive  
legitimate email from that domain.

If there were another field in the DKIM-Signature header, or an  
entirely separate email header covered by the DKIM signature, that  
stated "all email sent using this domain in the From field will be  
DKIM signed" then any receiving MTA or MTA cluster could keep track of  
that state (probably using their existing reputation tracking system  
in the case of large receivers, and using a fairly trivial extension  
to their DKIM plugins in the case of smaller ones).

That would provide all the benefit of ADSP to senders who want it,  
without adding a per-email latency overhead for receivers who want to  
support it, at the cost of a keeping a fairly small amount of state at  
the receiving MTA.

(Other information could be communicated in-band in the same way -  
including "we're no longer dkim signing every email sent").

Did we already look at this idea and discard it before we settled on  
using a DNS query for every email received?

Cheers,
   Steve

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