Technical Summary
This specification registers Enhanced Status Codes for
email authentication failures. The intended status is Proposed Standard as
the specification seeks to improve interoperability by allowing the SMTP
server to provide more information to the SMTP client.
Review and Consensus
The document was discussed by seven participants within the Applications
Area Working Group and it has the consensus of the working group. Most of
issues raised were resolved. An outstanding issue is the term
"author-aligned". It was agreed to resolve that during the Last Call.
The significant issue was how to handle cases where multiple authentication
checks failed. Alexey Melnikov was not convinced about having an enhanced
status code for that case, but in the end is okay with doing that as it provides more
information. There was agreement to assign an enhanced status code for such a
case.
There was some discussion about whether to register additional enhanced status
codes for DMARC. The working group agreed to handle that as part of the
DMARC work.
There was a very strong objection to including enhanced status codes for DKIM
as it violates a recommendation in RFC 6376. There was agreement to have text
in this document to make it clear that is not recommended behaviour and
it is a local policy decision, and this allayed the objections.
Personnel
The document shepherd is S. Moonesamy. The Responsible Area Director is
Barry Leiba.