Hi, all
in the light of the discussion about draft-ietf-dkim-mailinglists I'd
like to propose an alternative way to solve the MLM dilemma on how to
deal with original DKIM signature/message versus sending out a modified
version of the message. This proposal may be impractical or hard to
realize, but I'd just thought I had to share it with you.
The proposal is to preserve the original message + DKIM signature and to
add the new (probably partially rewritten) output message, combined into
a multipart/alternative structure. The combined message is sent by the
MLM to the recipient. For the original message + DKIM signature, we
could register a Content-Type of e.g. message/dkim-original-message with
IANA. The output message would be the other part of the
multipart/alternative, with the normal MIME structure of the MLM output
message. A sample message sent by an MLM (or more in general, by a
re-signer) would look like:
From: "Rolf E. Sonneveld"<R(_dot_)E(_dot_)Sonneveld(_at_)sonnection(_dot_)nl>
To: DKIM List<ietf-dkim(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org>
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:43:39 +0200
Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] Feedback on draft-ietf-dkim-mailinglists for discussion
DKIM-Signature: ... DKIM signature provided by re-signer goes here ...
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=boundary1234
--boundary1234
Content-Type: message/dkim-original-message
... original version of message including all original headers and _original
DKIM signature_ goes here ...
--boundary1234
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Content-type: text/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII
... output message of MLM goes here ...
--boundary1234--
As per MIME RFC 2046 (par. 5.1.4) multipart/alternative provides a
means of presenting multiple versions of the same information, where the
receiving MUA can decide which one to display to the recipient. In a
sense we can view the original message and the one, that is being sent
out by the MLM, more or less as two incarnations of the same message,
and as such I think the multipart/alternative can be used. As the
message/dkim-original-message subtype will not be recognized by MUA's,
we can be sure that the end user will be presented by the MLM rewritten
version of the message.
The advantages of using this approach are:
- the original DKIM-signature is preserved. The verifier can verify both
the original DKIM signature of the author domain, as well as the DKIM
signature of the MLM domain.
- any FBL can use the message/dkim-original-message information to send
the feedback to the proper place
- no need to rewrite From address (and Sender, Reply-To)
- this approach can be used for other 're-signing' mail agents in the
chain between sender and recipient
- it can also be used when there is more than one re-signer in the chain
(nested multipart/alternative structure) to provide a generic solution
Disadvantages of this approach are:
- it requires the verification paragraph of DKIM to be rewritten
- the size of MLM redistributed messages is doubled roughly (hey, nobody
complained about the extra size of text/plain + text/html messages ;-))
- it will probably require more changes in MLM software than the other
proposals
I'm sure there is a whole lot more to say about this proposal, more
pros, more cons etc. I solicit your comments!
/rolf
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