"encryption based message contents authentication" seemed
pretty clear to me. Can you suggest some different text
that would work better?
Unfortunately, I think this is akin to MARID's first
milestone of picking an identity... and we all saw how well
that went.
I think it should be backed up a notch to the actual
functional description... as in the difference between
protection against bounces vs. protecting the bounce address.
"message contents authentication" is quite precise and does not
mean bounces or bounce address. it means the message, itself.
And if the charter can't be wordsmithed enough to state that
the working group is attempting to stop users from seeing
forged data or the working group is attempting to stop mail
servers from acting on forged data or whatever, then this
well, i suppose that "authentication of an email message and its
contents." could be translated into "preventing false claims of
authorship of an email message and its contents".
what i do not understand is how that would improve the charter?
And while we're at it, why not get the DNS RR issue out of
the way too?
Most/all of the candidate proposals have specific details about
the use of DNS and/or another query service. So I guess you are
suggesting decomposing things into major pieces of design choice.
And I think that raises an interesting question: is the work
best done as an effort to do a design from the ground up,
deciding on individual components that are then assembled
together, or should the working group take one (or more) specific
proposals and work to refine them (minimally)?
There is a great deal of experience that very strongly suggests
that the latter is the only way to achieve any sort of timely
working group output.
d/
--
Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://brandenburg.com>