Frank, your writing is brilliant, but hard to follow with all the acronyms and
"insider" talk. For those new to the list, whenever Frank says "Dave", he is
referring not to me, but to Dave Crocker, an email expert who wrote "Internet
Mail Architecture"
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-crocker-email-arch-09.txt, a grand
unified synthesis of email terminology and concepts.
Using Crocker's terminology from Fig. 3, our diagram
/
Sender(s) --> Transmitter--> / --> Receiver --> Forwarder(s) --> MDA -->
Recipient
/
Border
might look like:
Originator(s) --> Source --> Relay(s) --> Dest --> Recipient
with no special role for Transmitter or Receiver, and no special significance
or even recognition of a Border between originating and receiving networks. In
Crocker's view, there are many borders, one for each ADMD (Administrative
Management Domain). An ADMD might include one or more of the {Source,
Relay(s), Dest} machine-level entities in the above diagram. If we want
administrative-level entities, the best we can do is Fig.4:
+-------+ +-------+ +-------+
| ADMD1 | | ADMD3 | | ADMD4 |
| ----- | | ----- | | ----- |
| | +---------------------->| | | |
| User | | |-Edge--+--->|-User |
| | | | +---------+ +--->| | | |
| V | | | ADMD2 | | +-------+ +-------+
| Edge--+---+ | ----- | |
| | | | | |
+-------+ +----|-Transit-+---+
| |
+---------+
Again, no recognition of a single, most-important Border. Even worse from an
SPF point-of-view, this diagram implies there are "Transit ADMDs" with no
relationship to either side.
I think Crocker's document is a noble effort to satisfy everyone, but in doing
that, it ends up with such complexity and generality that it is hard to use
when we need simplicity and specificity for a particular discussion, like we
are having now on how to solve the forwarding problem.
Luckily, we don't need to satisfy everyone, just the participants in this
discussion. We can use terminology like "transmitter" and "border", expand the
diagram as needed to include a few "secondary borders", then make a new diagram
for the next discussion.
One last question, before we proceed with the discussion - Should we clarify
the role of Sender, i.e. individual vs domain? My sense is that we are talking
about a domain, but it probably doesn't matter. Crocker's document defines
Originator as being equivalent to Author, so it seems he referring to an
individual. Maybe we should just use the phrase "individual sender" in any
context where it matters.
At 05:21 AM 1/12/2008 +0100, Frank wrote:
David MacQuigg wrote:
a Forwarder has a direct relationship with a Recipient,
who also has a direct relationship with the Receiver,
thereby forming an indirect relationship between the
Forwarder and Receiver
Were the forwarder might have no idea that the receiver
checks SPF, and the receiver might have no idea that the
forwarder is a forwarder, and the recipient has no idea
at all what this is about, he just clicked buttons... ;-)
LOL :>) This perfectly describes an interaction I had with an "ADMD" yahoo.com.
They put my forwarding service (box67.com) on their "bulk" list (Yahoo's
euphemism for spam), in spite of the fact that we forward only what the
recipient wants us to forward, in this case, everything including the spam.
When the recipient clicks the "Spam" button in Yahoo's webmail client (instead
of forwarding it to our spamreport address, as we instructed), Yahoo dings the
reputation of box67.com.
I don't have a good solution to this problem. Yahoo doesn't allow their
recipients to set up individual whitelists (although they do have individual
blacklists, so I know its not a question of resources). One thing we do
recommend for any recipient forwarding to a large unresponsive service, is that
they set up a separate account just to receive forwarded mail, and turn off all
spam filtering on that account.
Sure, I know what you mean. And if TENBOX or whatever
allows forwarder and receiver to enter into a direct
relationship it's fine. Recipient and receiver should be
interested that this works. It's less obvious why the
forwarder should care about it. And if he cares, why SRS
isn't good enough.
box67.com (the receiver and forwarder) does use SRS on its forwarded mail, and
we still have a problem with yahoo.com (the MDA). SRS hides that we are
forwarding the mail.
At 11:59 AM 1/12/2008 +0100, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
Frank Ellermann wrote:
Different "terminologies" reflect different "ideologies"
May I suggest that we use a community web page on openspf.org
for writing a glossary with the definition (and possibly
pointers to relevant archived post) of any term that is meant
to last more than a single thread?
Good suggestion, but we may have difficulty getting agreement on terminology
even for this one thread.
-- Dave
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