ietf-dkim
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ietf-dkim] On changing From: when sending through lists

2010-08-10 19:13:38
Comments?  And if you agree, your rationales in either direction?
(I'll take Daniel's text at that link into account.)

Unless I misunderstand, this is a paper proposal that has never been
implemented that addresses a quite possibly purely hypothetical
problem.

There's nothing wrong with unimplemented paper designs, but what you
do with them is to write them up in an I-D, ask the IETF to publish it
as Experimental (something I'd encourage the WG to do for this one),
and once there's at least a modest amount of real life experience,
perhaps come back and propose an updated version for standards track.
For a good idea of the way this can work, look at the EAI group. It
published a variety of Experimental RFCs fof non-ASCII email
addresses, and now after they have some experience, they're moving
ahead with one that seems to work less badly than the others.  It's
not the one I'd have expected them to pick, but when I read the
messages about their experience, I see why they made the choice they
did.

I have to say that this particular proposal is currently no more than
1/3 baked, since unless I've missed something, I don't see much effort
to work out failure and security models.  For example:

- Who do you accept forwarded messages from? List subscribers? Anyone?
  Subscribers and people who sign up on a forward-me pseudo list?

- If a forwarded message is rejected or bounces, what do you do?  At
  what point should you stop trying to forward?  If you get mail to an
  address that you don't forward any more do you reject it? Drop it?
  Something else?

- What do you do when someone unsubscribes?  When someone bounces off the
  list?  When someone changes his subscription address? (Yes, there are
  MLMs that let you do that.)

- What kind of spam filtering is appropriate for forwarded messages?
  For returning bounces?  Should you try to distinguish between real
  bounces and spam to bounce addresses ?

- Many MUAs collect outgoing addresses into the local address book, so
  people who really have one address will now appear to have N+1 if
  they subscribe to N lists.  Is that a problem?  Why or why not?  If
  it's a problem, what should you do about it?

That's all that occurs to me in five minutes, but I'm sure that if you
actually try it, you'll find lots more.

R's,
John


_______________________________________________
NOTE WELL: This list operates according to 
http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html