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Re: [Asrg] We don't need no stinkin IMAP or POP, was Adding a spam button to MUAs

2010-02-07 02:22:16
Michael Thomas wrote:
John Levine wrote:
SRV has been around for 15 years, and it's intended for telling you
where a domain provides a particular service, which is what we're doing here. Is there DNS software we care about that can support TXT
with a funny name but not SRV?

I think that the dkim/spf experience is that anything beyond A and CNAME causes
some dns providers out there to fail. Text does have the advantage that more providers are supporting it because of dkim/spf. I don't think that srv has the same penetration and/or use.... which is a pity because srv records are actually pretty nice in theory.

Using SRV records would be consistent with similar email auto-configuration records defined in http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-srv-email

It may be worth to note that such automatic configuration specification is arriving after years of manual configuration experience. Yet, it does not provide for automatically enabling the A-R field defined by RFC 5451 which, for security reasons, requires its field to be ignored "unless specifically enabled by the user or administrator after verifying that the border MTA is compliant". Possibly, such MTA compliance will eventually be flagged using DNS RRs as well, but A-R is not yet a widely deployed field.

Seeking auto-configuration for TiS buttons apparently clashes with the experience summarized above. Alex has described how flexible reporting flow could work, in a recent message. His description resembles the way spam complaints have been produced for many years. However, the reason why we want TiS buttons is that the volume of spam is so high that we cannot keep its pace unless we automate reporting. Even then, why do we want the mechanism for automatic reporting to also be automatically configurable?

The possible reasons that I can think of are as follows:

* users cannot determine whether their mailbox providers support
  spam reporting,

* MUAs cannot determine which is the last report-supporting MTA, if
  any, that received a given inbound message,

* most users already gave up reporting spam and won't resume unless
  presented with a fully automated tool, won't even go to the
  trouble of configuring it, or

* the reporting address isn't really fixed, and may vary without
  advice, independently of any other mailbox parameter.

Are there more? And which ones are more relevant?
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