On Wed, 30 Jul 1997 17:04:52 -0700 (PDT) Chris Newman
<Chris(_dot_)Newman(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com> wrote:
I want to be able to subscribe to list foo as
<chris(_dot_)newman+foo(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com> and have it delivered to me.
In order for
this to work, I need user agents which let me type the "+foo" in the from
...
Chris,
I think you are right, and that it is probably worth giving
up the availability "+" for anything else to get where we
need to be. But, logically speaking, most of your argument
evaporates if either of two courses is taken:
(1) We went through a long and difficult period in which we
eventually convinced most of those who develop list
management software that it was rational to permit people
to set a "list target" address that was different from the
"from:" header field address. One could adopt a model in
which, logically, there were three addresses
From:
List distro (defaults to from, but can be changed)
List posting (defaults to from --not list distro-- but
can be changed)
(2) We go where, because of spam and spoofing issues, I
think we are headed anyway, which is not accepting material
for posting to a list unless a digital signature can be
verified. Then the "subscribe" operation somehow has to
register a public key (or pointer to one). But then "right
to post" is a key identifier/ signature verification issue,
not a matter of matching return address strings; the latter
becomes largely superfluous.
If this logic is correct, can you make the case that it is
worth a possibly-significant risk to the infrastructure
(yes, there really are addresses -- especially in mappings
to and from strange gateways to LAN mail systems -- in
which "+" is a delimiter character, but not for
subaddressing, and several of them may appear in a
local-part) for what may be a short-term gain?
john