Yahoo Statement on DMARC policy

Yesterday Yahoo posted a statement about their new p=reject policy. Based on this statement I don’t expect Yahoo to be rolling back the policy any time soon. It seems it was incredibly effective at stopping spoofed Yahoo mail.

On Friday afternoon last week, Yahoo made a simple change to its DMARC policy from “report” to “reject”. In other words, we requested that all other mail services reject emails claiming to come from a Yahoo user, but not signed by Yahoo.
Yahoo is the first major email provider in the world to adopt this aggressive level of DMARC policy on behalf of our users.
And overnight, the bad guys who have used email spoofing to forge emails and launch phishing attempts pretending to come from a Yahoo Mail account were nearly stopped in their tracks.
There is a regrettable, short-term impact to our more aggressive position on DMARC. Many legitimate emails sent on behalf of Yahoo Mail customers from third parties are also being rejected. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Given the effectiveness of this policy, I would not be surprised to see other free mail providers (Gmail, Hotmail, AOL) or other ISPs to adopt this policy in the coming months. This is a shift in how many of us are used to using email, particularly personal email. But, as Yahoo says, times have changed and it’s time to take those painful actions that will increase our security.
In addition to making a public statement, Yahoo also published a number of things that senders (i.e., email intermediaries) can do to still handle email from Yahoo addresses as they are sent through different infrastructures. Many of these recommendations for senders are things that are already in process at most ESPs and mailing lists.
This seemingly simple policy statement is a revolutionary step in addressing issues of forgery and spam that many people have been discussing and arguing about for more than 10 years. This is a painful change for many people, Yahoo and non-Yahoo users alike. Luckily, the internet community has stepped up and implemented the changes that will make mail work even with a restrictive policy like p=reject. Now that mailing lists and ESPs are taking the steps to accommodate this policy change I expect to see other ISPs follow Yahoo’s lead and start publishing p=reject policies. Luckily for them Yahoo was first, so the impact on their users and mailing list managers should be much lower than we’ve been dealing with the last week.

Related Posts

Problems with Yahoo FBL

There are a couple problems I’ve been alerted to with the Yahoo FBL today.
The first comes from Michael Ellis and is about broken FBL reporting at Yahoo.

Read More

Yahoo DMARC articles worth reading

There are a bunch of them and they’re all worth reading.
I have more to say about DMARC, both in terms of advice for senders and list managers affected by this, and in terms of the broader implications of this policy decision. But those articles are going to take me a little longer to write.
How widespread is the problem? Andrew Barrett publishes numbers, pulled from his employer, related to the number of senders using @yahoo.com addresses in their commercial emails. Short version: a low percentage but a lot of users and emails in raw numbers.
What can mailing list managers do? Right now the two answers seem to be stop Yahoo.com addresses from posting or fix your mailing list software. Al has posted how he patched his software to cope, and linked to a post by OnlineGroups.net about how they patched their software.
A number of people are recommending adding an Original Authentication Results header as recommended in the DMARC.org FAQ. I’m looking for more information about how that would work.
For commercial mailers, there doesn’t seem to be that much to do except to not use @yahoo.com address as your header-From address. Yes, this may affect delivery while you’re switching to the new From address, but right now your mail isn’t going to any mailbox provider that implements DMARC checking.
One other thing that commercial mailers and ESPs should be aware of. Depending on your bounce handling processes, this may cause other addresses to bounce off the list. Once the issue of the header-From address is settled, you can reactivate addresses that bounced off the list due to authentication failures since April 4.
 

Read More

A brief DMARC primer

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. What DMARC does is allow domain owners to publish policy statements in DNS telling receiver domains what to do with messages that do not authenticate. In addition, DMARC introduces the concept of “domain alignment.” What this means is that the authentication has to be from the same domain (or a sub-domain) as the address in the header-from: line. The idea behind DMARC is that organizational owners can use SPF and DKIM authentication to authenticate their actual domain in the header-from line. This moves authentication from a important but behind the scenes technology out to an end user visible technology.

Read More