ietf-dkim
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Re: [ietf-dkim] Lists "BCP" draft available

2010-05-18 01:21:04
Lists never have had DKIM to deal with, so they've never had the option to 
make any such promise.  The signature lends the MLM's credibility to the 
message, which in turn could hurt the MLM's credibility if it turns out to be 
signing garbage.  How else would a reputation for signers work?

Once again we return to this strange assumption that list managers will 
supinely allow garbage to flow through their lists, yet go to great effort 
to apply clever signature hacks so their recipients can recognize that 
same garbage.  The lists I've been using for the past 35 years have used a 
variety of techniques, some automated and some manual, to manage the stuff 
that gets onto the list and keep the garbage out in the first place. 
Does anyone expect that to change?  Why wouldn't a list just do whatever 
it does to manage its traffic, and then sign all its outgoing mail, so you 
can recognize mail from the list?  It might well add DKIM to the 
repertoire of techniques used to filter the incoming mail, but that's no 
more evident (mechanically at least) to the recipients than any of the 
filtering techniques they use now.  And if a list does lousy message 
management and does leak garbage, wouldn't you want the list and its 
signature to have a poor reputation?

The MLM wants to signal to the recipient the veracity of the origin.

Nothing personal, but there is not a shred of evidence that any list has 
any such intention.  If it were important for lists to verify that the 
contributor's address were "real", they would be verifying and applying 
S/MIME signatures.  The fact that there's no A-R like thing to tell 
whether an S/MIME signature used to verify suggests that it's not 
something anyone's wanted to know.  I want to know whether an incoming 
message is from a list to which I subscribe.  But I don't try to second 
guess the way the list owners manage the lists now, and I see no reason 
why DKIM would change that.

R's,
John
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