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Re: [ietf-dkim] Why mailing lists should strip DKIM signatures

2010-04-23 18:06:45
If you begin to get complaints because you are on some list whose owner 
isn't bothering to conduct list hygiene, I would imagine you'd 
ultimately unsubscribe from the list and find or create another one 
that's properly managed.

I am about 99% certain that the FBL reports that started this discussion 
were either a guy who wanted to unsub from the list, or he reported his 
whole inbox.  Nearly all of the FBL reports I get are one or the other, 
but this was the first time I got them for someone else's list.  As I 
believe I said, it didn't break anything here, but it was a useless 
transaction, and for a small site like mine that has users who belong to a 
lot of lists, it could easily dominate FBL traffic.

Or to put it another way, it scales poorly since the amount of traffic 
depends on the number of other subscribers, not on anything under your own 
control.  For something like Dave Farber's IP list, with hundreds of 
thousands of subscribers, the number of bogus reports per message sent 
could become large.

On the third hand, in practice, this is unlikely to be a big deal, since 
it is my impression that in the world at large, the number of lists (as 
opposed to courtesy forwards) that don't break the signature is 
insignificant.  But I think it is of interest to try and figure out where 
the responsibility belongs for list mail, other than "everywhere", and 
what to recommend to people to make that easy to implement.


Me too.  Mail from the list is the responsibility of the list.  QED and
all that.

But if you redact the original signature, you're only providing some of 
the information that could be provided to the receiver.

Well, yes, leaving out irrelevant info avoids misleading them.  More info 
is not necessarily better, particularly in a situation like this where a 
recipient doesn't know the order or relationship of multiple signatures 
unless it has separate knowledge about the parties involved.

Lists, specifically, in that instance.  Something like: X sends to a 
list at Y that then relays to Z; Z trusts Y to implement DKIM and 
Authentication-Results and all that properly, so Z believes Y when it 
says "X had a signature on here that verified" even if X's signature on 
arrival at Z is either invalid or absent.

This returns us to the original question.  Other than the implausible 
scenario of a system that is managed well enough to maintain the chain of 
signature headers, but that makes no attempt to keep spam out of its 
lists, in what scenario would this be of practical use in managing Z's 
mail?  If Z trusts Y, why wouldn't it be sending reports about Y's lists 
to Y?

People have been saying since the dawn of DKIM that they want to see the 
incoming signatures on list mail, but I have yet to hear a plausible story 
about what to do with them.  As far as I can tell, it's just an unexamined 
assumption that more signatures must be better, or that they as the 
original signer will then somehow be able to tell recipients what to do.

R's,
John
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