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Then you don't deal with email in the real world. DMARC prevents legitimate emails from people in the real world from being delivered because people make mista
by bcrl 2mo ago
Then you don't deal with email in the real world. DMARC prevents legitimate emails from people in the real world from being delivered because people make mistakes with their email systems. Passing DMARC is not a signal that the email isn't legitimate; it's merely a sign that someone correctly set up their mail server to modern standards. The email might be an impersonation, or not. There's no way to know.
DMARC does absolutely nothing to prevent the kind of impersonation that occurs in the real world. It doesn't block homoglyphs or or typo-squatting or all the other forms impersonation that matter. It has failed at preventing impersonation.
Just a few days ago I had a phishing email from an elderly woman I had previously done some work for. The message passed DMARC and everything else, and the domain it was sent from was valid. But it was not legitimate; it was an impersonation of her which became obvious once the content was read.
DMARC is noise, not signal. It has to be ignored in the real world as it provides virtually no value beyond blocking emails pretty randomly because someone made a mistake when rotating their DKIM keys or one of a million other mistakes that do happen.
- thedougd 2mo agoOkay but that doesn’t detract from the intended purpose of DMARC.
- ryandrake 2mo agoPerfect example of "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does."[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoThat saying is bullshit. The purpose of a system is, by definition, what it is intended to do, not what it does. You can judge efficacy by the results, but not the purpose.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- inigyou 2mo agoNo, the entire purpose of the POSIWID principle is to refute what you just said. Do read the wikipedia page linked above. You called it out yourself when you said "by definition" - there is definition, and then there is reality, and they need not align.