Recently, I have been doing a deep-dive into my DMARC feedback.   Not much
can be learned.

I tried to determine which of my outbound messages are represented by the
incoming reports.   The match is not easy.   From my configuration and the
outbound SMTP log, I know
Source IP
RFC5321.MailFrom Domain
RFC5322.From Domain
RFC5321.To domain
MX host domain name
SMTP Result Code and Extended Status code

>From the incoming report, I have
Source IP
RFC5321.MailFrom Domain
RFC5322.From Domain
Organization name, which is sometimes a domain name and sometimes free text.
Email contact domain name
Domain name from the attachment's file prefix.
Disposition counts

For the initial exercise, disposition was not a consideration because no
messages were rejected

To match the two data sets, I needed to guess a connection between the MX
hostname and the report organization data. Intelligent guesswork gets me
pretty far, but it still leaves a lot of holes.

A helpful exception is Yahoo, which supplies the RFC5321.To domain as the
prefix of the report filename.  Their timestamps also appear precise,
because I have been able to match their reports without any count or time
discrepancies.

At the opposite pole is iphmx.com, which fragments their report data across
multiple subdomains, which I may or may not have correctly matched to MX
records.   Worse yet, they have reports for seemingly identical sources
with overlapping time intervals.

Several multi-tenant server organizations, including iphmx.com, only report
DMARC for the subset of client domains which evaluate and enforce DMARC
results.   Since the sender has no knowledge of which domains are or are
not evaluating DMARC, there is no way to know which outbound messages are
included in the report and which are not.

All of this means that if some messages are being blocked by an evaluator's
local policy, I have a low expectation of knowing which recipient users are
affected, which means that I cannot contact those users to ask them for
assistance, even if I have an alternate way to reach them.

Do we have any ideas for making this match process simpler, or do we take
the position that this type of matching process is not supported and should
not be attempted?

Just asking,

Doug Foster
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