LISTSERV will do a DMARC rewrite for any domain that publishes a DMARC record with “p=reject”. So if an educational institution publishes such a policy record in their public DNS, LISTSERV will re-write the From: line of messages posted from that domain.

As for the replies, it works if the LISTSERV server has the mail aliases correctly configured. For LISTSERV on Windows, this is automatic (because SMTPL handles the inbound mail). For sendmail/postfix/exim/etc. sites (or for Windows sites that use a mail gateway that validates the username portion of inbound mail), they need to have a wildcard *-dmarc-request alias in place, or replies to the senders of DMARC-re-written addresses will fail.

 

 

 

Dear LSTOWN-L readers,

 

My understanding of DMARC (admittedly limited) is that it works to prevent abuse of accounts registered with AOL, Yahoo, and the like.  But recently an email with the domain .edu was processed by DMARC and sent out to a list that I read.  Why would an email from an account hosted at a bona fide educational institution get the attention of DMARC?

 

I also thought that you could send a reply to one of the "dmarc" addresses that Listserv® automatically generates when it encounters DMARC processing, and that your reply would be delivered to the correspondent.  I've been checking around with a couple of correspondents: sometimes it does, sometimes not.  The person with the .edu address didn't get my email.  Fortunately, the correspondent had included her actual address, so I was able to see that and write to her.  Nor was she able to post to a different list which I serve as co-listowner.   She verified that the email was in her "sent" folder, but it never got to the list.

 

Can anyone shed any light on this situation?  What is the status of DMARC these days? 

 

Sincerely - Ian

 

 

Ian Fairclough

Cataloging and Metadata Services Librarian

George Mason University

703-993-2938

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