Re: [ietf-dkim] MLMs and signatures again

> Perhaps an MLM's reputation is pulled up or down as the average of those of its 
> participants, so if the MLM can attract "good" senders, suddenly entire threads 
> start getting through.  But that would only be possible with signature survival.
In my experience, the reputation of the list is unrelated to the 
reputation of its participants.  For example, in my filters I deliver mail 
from this list directly into the inbox without content filtering, even 
though I discard mail sent directly from a few of the subscribers.
With 40 years of experience with MLMs, a lot of experiments have already 
happened, and we should spend more time looking at the history rather than 
guessing what might happen under some hypothetical circumstances.  For 
example, we don't have to do experiments to find out whether people want 
an MUA to distingish between signed and unsigned parts of a message. 
We've already had partially signed messages (like this one, if you get it 
through the list) for over a decade, and MUAs don't care.  Either they 
don't see the signature at all (Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail), or they 
show the message without any particular distinction between the signed and 
unsigned parts (Evolution, Apple Mail, Alpine.)
If anyone's claiming that contributors' DKIM signatures on list mail are 
important, a good start would be to look at how PGP and S/MIME signatures 
have been treated during the many years they've been in use.  I don't see 
any harm in experiments like having an MLM adding a signed A-R header to 
the mail, since it doesn't break anything that works now, but I would want 
rather concrete evidence from anyone claiming that people pay any more 
attention than they do to S/MIME signatures now.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for 
Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

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