I think that the requirements are reversed here. The onus is on the
signature format to be list-friendly which at this point requires the
ability to append stuff on the end of a message.
I think that the S/MIME and PGP signature formats are both problematic at
best, they appear to be afterthoughts to a spec whose main purpose is
encryption. Separating out signature and encryption makes a huge anmount of
sense. XML signature was deliberately created to allow for signatures to be
addres transparently to legacy envelopes.
phill
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ietf-mailsig(_at_)mail(_dot_)imc(_dot_)org
[mailto:owner-ietf-mailsig(_at_)mail(_dot_)imc(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of David
Woodhouse
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 10:56 AM
To: Michael Thomas
Cc: John Levine; ietf-mailsig(_at_)imc(_dot_)org; dwing(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: more hand waving about mailing lists
On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 07:48 -0800, Michael Thomas wrote:
David Woodhouse writes:
> We don't need to know all possible ways. We know that by far the
most > common is the addition of a few lines of text, and IIM can
already cope > with that. That's enough for us, I think. The
remaining breakage should > be very uncommon.
And... re-mailers can change their behavior to be signature
friendly
too. Which ought to be encouraged for S/MIME, etc anyway.
Yes, but we need to be very careful here. You can perhaps get
away with requiring change in a _few_ esoteric situations,
but you really can't do that for all mailing lists. You can't
stop people from adding the footer to list traffic which
tells the idiots^Wsubscribers how to unsubscribe without
spamming the list with their requests.
--
dwmw2