The JSON DSL for rewriting emails feels like a spammer/exploit vector waiting to happen. Some product is going to spam filter before applying reconstruction rules, or get tricked into applying reconstruction rules when it shouldn't, and spammers and scammer are going to abuse it.
Until either Google or Microsoft will adopt these standards, they'll remain effectively meaningless most likely. But even so, it's good to know people haven't given up on fixing email's spam problem entirely.
The effect of all this seems to be less "making e-mail secure" and more "making it so that only Google, Apple, and Microsoft can send e-mail successfully"
Recently I checked the IP against blacklists, waited a few months, did all of the other things, and then found out Microsoft bounces my entire VPS’s IP range. Appealing did not help.
They intermittently block Cloudflare email routing IPs too. All of these security measures and still it comes down to the IP address of your sender.
When you use them together and have a DMARC policy that requires one of them or the other for successful delivery, it's the best current solution.
Which big three?
Gmail has something like 1.8 billion users. iCloud mail around 1 billion.
Microsoft with 400 million users of its email is closer to Yahoo! Mail (225 million users) than to the big two.
1. You have to set it up on every sending server. It's easier today but it wasn't always
2. You have to periodically rotate each of the keys that you setup because they can be cracked/stolen. Soon as somebody steals your key, they can impersonate anyone sending email from your domain.
3. Receiving email servers have no way of knowing if a message they received without a DKIM signature is supposed to include a DKIM signature, so simply not including one creates a scenario where receiving mail servers have to guess if the message was really from you.
And on the receiving side, the policy is similarly simple: if I receive any unsigned or unaligned email, I will reject it.
Edit: to clarify, I want there to be an option where I specify my DMARC policy to explicitly tell well-configured receiving servers "ignore whatever I have configured as my SPF record, only look at the signatures". There will no doubt be a long tail of mail servers where I will still need an SPF record for them to accept my mail.
They both have fairly clean migration paths and resolve a lot of the annoying edge cases that currently exist with authenticating and verifying email.
... said every spammer.
I'm sorry for your pain, and I'm in the same boat.
But it's important to understand that any sufficiently large, distributed-agent system (like federated email), will see the rise of parasites that will pump resources and diminish the value of the system.
What we're seeing here is an "immune" response to those parasites. We all pay for it.
I think this is an important lesson for anyone designing a distributed-agent system [1]. How do you design it so as to keep the bad actors out, or at least so their impact is negligeable?
[1] imma make my own email system! With blackjack, and hookers! oh wait...
Making a spec that contains a venn diagram of most of the features each of the signatories to the specification have implemented themselves ends up pulling the ladder up behind them. Each non-academic committee member discovers they're already more than 75% of the way to having completed the spec and any junior members or amateurs have years of work to do in order to catch up to Now. If any upstarts threaten to get within striking distance of an implementation you can always convene the committee again and discuss version 2 of the spec.
Mobile devices tamped this down just a little bit but mostly they lowered the slope of the line a hair and changed where the focus was a bit.
meysamazad•2d ago
you're among the first few who have done it:
https://github.com/mjl-/mox/issues/404#issuecomment-43627498...