Eliot Lear wrote:
Hi Murray,
On 10/1/09 10:27 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
How can one forget that which was never true to begin with?
The working group and its antecedents, as far as I'm aware, have always been
pretty adamant about the fact that reducing spam has never been one of its
goals.
I think it was the goal of many who participated to reduce spam. That
having been said, DKIM by itself cannot reduce spam, and that was always
readily apparent. DKIM can be used as one of a number of components to
a comprehensive approach to identifying legitimate email. If all of
that happens, then the economic incentives for spamming would seem to
dwindle.
For me, it was about limiting the degrees of freedom that bad guys had to
operate in. There will always be bad guys trying to do bad things; the mark
of civilization in general is how much impunity they have. I think that
DKIM moves us in the "civilized" direction.
That's a lot of moving parts, of course.
All of this having been said, I think Scott Kitterman is right. I still
think the standard needs more soak time. But that's me.
I tend to agree, but then again there's only so much navel gazing that a
standards
body can do. It's now been about 5 years since Y! and we simultaneously
came up with the same general idea. There's been running code for nearly
as long.
The real question that IETF needs to answer is not whether it's useful
per se, but
whether there are inherent issues with the protocol which limit its
utility. I really
haven't heard anything about that though modulo standard carping about
woulda-shouldas from the usual suspects. Maybe there's a vast latent
pool of
disaffection, but after all this time is there any reason to believe
that they'll
suddenly appear, issues in hand?
Mike
Eliot
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