I wonder if it is a generation gap thing. The young folks these days have probably used only Gmail, Proton or one of these big email services that abstract away all the technical details of sending and receiving emails. Without some visibility into the technical details of how emails are composed and sent they might not have ever known that the email headers are not some definite source of truth but totally user defined and can be set to anything.
+1, Even if they validate DKIM/SPF+alignment (aka DMARC) that would only verify the domain. There is no local part verification possible for the receiver, the sending server needs to be trusted with proper auth
How is it not? For all but some old and insecure or fairly exotic setups, DKIM/DMARC validates the sender server is authorised for that domain and the server's account-based outbound filtering validates it was sent by the owner of that mailbox.
If the sending server doesn't do DKIM, it's fundamentally broken, move your email somewhere else. If the sending server lets any user send with an arbitrary local part, that's either intended and desired, or also fundamentally broken. If there are other senders registered on the domain with valid DKIM and you can't trust them, you have bigger problems.
> If the sending server doesn't do DKIM, it's fundamentally broken,
No, it just won't get very good deliverability, because everything it talks to is now fundamentally broken.
DKIM shouldn't exist. It was a bad idea from day one.
It adds very little real anti-spam value over SPF, but the worse part is exactly the model you describe. DKIM was a largely undiscussed, back-door change to the attributability and repudiability of email, and at the same time the two-tiered model it created is far, far less effective or usable than just end-to-end signing messages at the MUA.
blenderob|1 month ago
I wonder if it is a generation gap thing. The young folks these days have probably used only Gmail, Proton or one of these big email services that abstract away all the technical details of sending and receiving emails. Without some visibility into the technical details of how emails are composed and sent they might not have ever known that the email headers are not some definite source of truth but totally user defined and can be set to anything.
SoftTalker|1 month ago
pif|1 month ago
kro|1 month ago
franga2000|1 month ago
If the sending server doesn't do DKIM, it's fundamentally broken, move your email somewhere else. If the sending server lets any user send with an arbitrary local part, that's either intended and desired, or also fundamentally broken. If there are other senders registered on the domain with valid DKIM and you can't trust them, you have bigger problems.
Hizonner|1 month ago
No, it just won't get very good deliverability, because everything it talks to is now fundamentally broken.
DKIM shouldn't exist. It was a bad idea from day one.
It adds very little real anti-spam value over SPF, but the worse part is exactly the model you describe. DKIM was a largely undiscussed, back-door change to the attributability and repudiability of email, and at the same time the two-tiered model it created is far, far less effective or usable than just end-to-end signing messages at the MUA.