a short interview with Jakub Olexa, Founder and CEO at Mailkit, talking about the upcoming DMARC 2.0:

Jakub, can you share what’s the new DMARC 2.0, called DMARC new?

So the DMARC 2.0, also called DMARCbis is not that different from the current DMARC . It’s backward compatible.

It just simplifies a lot of stuff that was not correctly understood by many or not properly used or was not implemented at all. So some of the features or attributes like the percentage are going away because those were misunderstood and difficult to implement by the receiving side.

The reporting interval is going away because that was essentially ignored by everyone and everyone generated reports on their own schedule because it kind of makes sense. And there is a change in how the DMARC will be fetched from the DNS record.

So this affects subdomains and their parent domains. And originally, this was based on the PSL, the public suffix list were either you had a DMARC record at that specific level you’re from is so at a subdomain or it would go to the organizational level domain. But, this gets tricky to understand and implement when you have multiple levels of subdomains and led to confusions. Also, the dependence on public suffix list was a bit of a complication. So the new version will use Tree walk, so it will look to the next level above and then above and then above until it reaches the final one. So, those are essentially the major changes in DMARC 2.0.

Do we have a time frame when it’s going to be released? 

Well, it’s still a draft. It’s going to be definitely discussed this next week (June 2023), at M3AAWG, but I’m not involved directly with the IETF process, so I have no idea when this is going to become an RFC.