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Re: DKIM Signatures now being applied to IETF Email

2011-08-01 18:00:41
On Aug 1, 2011, at 6:57 PM, John Levine wrote:

Perhaps.  But it's difficult to escape the impression that this is
another example of IETF failing to solve an important problem by
focusing on a portion of the problem that's easy to solve, and ruling
the difficult part out of scope for the time being. 

It's definitely a case of the best being the enemy of the good.

There are some basic problems with any system of policy assertions:
the people making the assertions may be mistaken or lying (something
we've seen with ADSP), and there are precious few assertions that I
can make that are of any use to you in deciding how to deal with my
traffic.  Since you have no reason to believe my assertions unless you
already know me, you need mechanisms for third parties that can opine
about the credibility of self-assertions.  Inventing the mechanism is
only medium hard (see RFC 5518) but spinning up vouching services that
provide a usefully large amount of information is very hard.

I buy all of the above.

Does it follow, then, that the Right Thing to do is to avoid building any other 
parts of the system (even, say, the reputation service query protocol) until 
the easiest part is finished?

Keith

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