On Oct 30, 2008, at 9:26 AM, John R Levine wrote:
I think most of the likely candidate domains for using
"discardable" would disagree with your assertion John.
Then I have to say that they don't understand what discardable
means. Really, it says feel free to throw our mail away if you have
the least doubt about it. This chronic misconception is the main
reason that I doubt that discardable will be useful in practice,
since only a small fraction of people who assert it will truly
understand what they've said.
The term "discard" in RFC 5321 is used to mean the silent dropping of
information.
In the prior note you said "It's really only useful for banks and
places like Paypal sending out notices about accounts, not for any
domain with individual users."
As Michael suggested, these domains will not want to have their
messages silently discarded.
The term "discardable" suggests permission to violate RFC 5321 Section
2.1 MUST accept responsibility for either delivering the message or
properly reporting the failure. This same MUST is echoed in Section
3.6.3 , 4.4 and 6.1. Section 6.2 provides advice on making an
exception.
ADSP will affect _all_ messages from the domain. Few customers will
welcome messages from similar domains by the same institution.
Customers that have opted to go paperless will be negatively affected
by "discardable" since this affects all communications, even those
considered extremely important. Unless DKIM signatures are so robust
that _any_ type of failure provides very high confidence that the
messages are seriously fraudulent, then the silent discard is not the
best choice. If some institution ever had a problem with their DKIM
signatures, how will they become aware of the problem when _all_ their
messages are being silently discarded?
At least two people on the DKIM list suggested that this term would be
problematic. Instead of "Discardable", "Dismissible" would not imply
that not reporting a failure is now allowed.
-Doug
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