Bob,
You acknowledged the reasonableness of my examples and then used quite
different sorts of examples to claim there needs to be a civil and
legal naming structure.
If the president of my company declares a snow day, I do not need his
legal signature. I need only something I'm used to seeing as his
signature. In the case of TIS, the president's email address is
steve(_at_)tis(_dot_)com(_dot_) Mail coming from steve(_at_)tis(_dot_)com is
meaningful to TIS
employees without reference to any outside structure.
Now, I suppose if I received mail from your president, I'd have to do
some checking to see who he really is and whether he speaks with the
proper authority. But there's not much your president can say to me
that will have the same kind of impact that my president can have.
(And the same, in reverse, I suspect applies to you.)
I already know that spock(_at_)rsa(_dot_)com is Steve Dusse and that
kent(_at_)bbn(_dot_)com
is Steve Kent. I know that from lengthy interactions over the net.
If their messages are signed, then I can be assured those messages
were not sent by anyone else. Anything more is irrelevant. (If I
could figure out how to get either of them to repudiate various things
they've said, I'd be delighted. I definitely don't see a need for
additional mechanisms to prevent them from repudiating prior
utterances!)
Steve