I don’t think it’s a silly question. In fact I recently approached the Mailman
people to explore this question from their perspective.
It may be interesting or even somewhat useful to set up a new header
canonicalization that tolerates this kind of thing for lists, but the real
problem is that, statistically speaking, a list that adds a mnemonic to a
Subject: field in the way you’re discussing usually also does other things to
the list that will change the body. The MLM draft we have approaching WGLC
talks about several of these. It would be pretty complicated to construct a
canonicalization that anticipates all or even most of those.
Thus, fixing the mnemonic issue will only avoid a small number of broken
signatures overall.
I think a more interesting idea would be to use DOSETA to sign the MIME parts
instead of or in addition to the whole message. I’m starting to plan out an
implementation and will be looking for a couple of other sites interested in
conducting some experiments.
-MSK
From: ietf-dkim-bounces(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-dkim-bounces(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of Franck Martin
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 7:17 PM
To: ietf-dkim(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org
Subject: [ietf-dkim] If DKIM would ignore [] at the beginning of the subject
line
Silly question (?):
Knowing that many mailing lists add [topic] at the beginning of the Subject
line, what if DKIM was set to ignore that part when signing/verifying?
Would it help to solve the problem of broken signature thru mailing lists?
I realize the issue would be to also detect the add footer, but if I recall you
can specify in dkim to sign only a certain length of the body and not the whole
body.
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