Organizational domain
The highest domain in a name's hierarchy still run by the same organization, such as example.com for mail.example.com; DMARC uses it for relaxed alignment and policy lookup.
What it means
Relaxed alignment and policy inheritance both depend on knowing where an organization's domain ends. For mail.example.com that is example.com; for shop.example.co.uk it is example.co.uk, because co.uk is a public suffix.
RFC 7489 found it with a public suffix list. RFC 9989 replaces that with the DNS tree walk: receivers query _dmarc records up the name and take the record with the fewest labels, unless psd= tags say otherwise. The result is usually the same for ordinary domains, but owners can now mark boundaries in DNS themselves.
If no record is found anywhere, the domain itself is treated as its organizational domain.
Related terms
Sources
What this definition rests on. The wording is ours; the facts are theirs.
- RFC 9989: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), section 3.2.14rfc-editor.org
- RFC 9989: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), section 4.10rfc-editor.org
- RFC 9989: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), section 4.10.2rfc-editor.org
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