> The experiments I've seen with DK have shown that even rather
> simple-looking fuzzy matches can let through heavily mutated messages,
> while some common mutations like virus scanner tag lines can be really
> hard to deal with. I don't see any reason to think that IIM would be
> any different in those regards.
Huh? Both DK and IIM have a nofws canonicialization.
....
MTA's modify messages too. Sendmail, for example. Try
feeding it a line of 2049 'a's and see what happens.
And sendmail is hardly in outlier in this regard.
One of the hallmarks of serious discussion is working to integrate the views of
the other "side". This means doing more than blithely rejecting their points
or ignoring them.
You are managing to ignore the distinction between syntactic and semantic
modifications. It's been explained repeatedly.
You are also working pretty hard at ignoring lists with more than one item.
Concerns about header-copying are an example.
> The whole point of message signatures is to know who's responsible for
> the message. For mailing list messages, the responsible party is the
> list.
I disagree. When I view a message from John Levine
on ietf-mailsig(_at_)imc(_dot_)org, I think the responsible
party is John Levine, not 1000 monkeys diverted
from their day job of pounding out Shakespeare.
You are ignoring the nature and degree of modification that can be done -- and
IS done -- by a re-posting entity, like your or me or a mailing-list.
The entity that is "responsible" for a message from a mailing list is the
administrator of the list.
> You can't tell anything about the quality of a list by checking
> internal signatures. A list with no internal signatures might be
> manually moderated by someone who calls all the submitters on the
> phone to check that the messages are real. A list with 100% internal
> signatures could be 100% from dead Nigerian generals.
This is true of *any* intermediate in the path. Really.
And, as has been pointed out repeatedly, there is a difference between having
the power to make changes, by virtue of being any handler of a message in
transit, versus making changes as part of the nature of the service, as in the
case of mailing lists.
Random MTAs that make semantic changes to message content are rogue. Random
mailing lists that make semantic changes are just doing their job.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker a t ...
www.brandenburg.com