People using snail mail have little or no trouble understanding the
difference between the name and address on the outside of the paper
envelope, the name and address at the top of the letter, and the name
of the person who signs the letter. Each of these names/addresses
serves different purposes which are easily understood. Email is no
different, and no more difficult to understand.
Ahh yes. The inevitable hoary strawman that is wheeled out during such
discussions. That a physical communication medium such as snail mail has
constraints that require addressing complexity, or make addressing complexity
possible, in no way implies that it's desirable, fully understood or necessary
in other mediums.
You are missing the point. The fact that snail mail has this kind of
addressing complexity has nothing to do with the fact that it's
physical, but rather it exists because
- it is useful and appropriate for messages to be largely opaque to the
transport and delivery system, and still provide the service of
delivery and nondelivery reporting;
- it is useful and desirable to have nondelivery reports be able to go
to a different address than that of the message author;
- it is useful and desirable for recipients to be able forward contents
(or partial contents) of messages to other recipients; and
- it is useful and desirable to be able to forward messages to other
recipients without opening them.
All of these are as true for email as for snail mail.
For kicks, I just asked my wife why people put their address on the inside
letter when it's already on the envelope.
Why should a nonrandomly selected sample size of one dictate the policy
for billions of future internet mail users?
Existing email user agents might blur the distinction between these, but
this is a user interface problem rather than a protocol problem. And
user interfaces _will_ have to adapt to take advantage of email
authentication, because email authentication creates new conditions that
users will need to be able to distinguish from existing conditions.
Sure. But that in no way implies that addressing has to get more complicated.
Maybe it's an opportunity to make it simpler?
Dumbing down the mail system would make it much less functional.
OTOH, imposing artificial simplicity would make DKIM much less useful.
It would be no better than the current crop of heuristic spam filters.
DKIM needs to reflect the diversity of real world requirements, not the
needs of a narrow subset of users.
Or to put it another way, I suspect the future of email is much more in
business correspondence than in short interpersonal messages that can
be sent by IM or SMS. That's just conjecture (based on current
trends) but it is an argument for not crippling email for business use.
Keith
_______________________________________________
ietf-dkim mailing list
http://dkim.org