[ih] bounce notifications and archive status

Steffen Nurpmeso via Internet-history internet-history at elists.isoc.org
Wed Nov 13 14:39:47 PST 2019


John Levine wrote in <20191113193641.CAE5DF3DBFC at ary.qy>:
 |In article <20191113182813.sg-Nv%steffen at sdaoden.eu> you write:
 |>But DKIM has to go over individual parts of the entire message (in
 |>practice), so the implementations cannot be as simple as "we dig
 |>anything until the first all-empty line, and do not care for
 |>actual content, the rest we do not care about at all".
 |>That is, i claim that putting it all in an envelope would not
 |>increase the cost of computation compared to status quo.
 |
 |Mail servers are invariably I/O bound.  Compute cost was not
 |a concern at all when we were designing DKIM.
 |
 |>It seems i am at odds again, however, since simply enwrapping
 |>anything within a signed envelope would have been the right
 |>approach also there. 
 |
 |What MUA do you use?  When we were trying to figure out what
 |anti-DMARC hack to use on the IETF's mailing lists I tried every
 |variation of MIME message wrapping I could think of, and without
 |exception, they all rendered badly in the MUAs that people use.
 |S/MIME barely works, any other kind of message wrapping is hopeless.

This is a furtherly developed BSD Mail, formerly called Heirloom
mailx, now S-nail for a while.  It needs more love, and i hope it
will get it.  It gets bitten a bit by distribution policies which
hits little projects that do not have resources to backport
hundreds of changesets to older stable releases.

Hopeless.  It looks a bit overwhelming with all the MIME part
informations which precede the parts, other than that, if there is
a way to produce a text version of a MIME part, that is shown
as-is.  Just like for example the number one text MUA mutt does,
though by far not so sophisticated yet, selection of individual
parts for reply etc. purposes for example is hard.  I could reply
to the wrapped messages, as it was the topmost citizen.

I have heared "IETF way of handling ML lists" several times now,
but is there an IETF-wide way of handling ML lists?  If i recall
correctly i have also seen this "via XY" syntax, but lists like
[art] or [Resolverless-dns] do not .. they then strip the DKIM
header but generate a RFC 7001 Authentication-Results:?
TUHS also seems to act that way?  I have not read this RFC yet,
downloaded it now.  There is no DKIM in those lists for sure.

It requires active configuration and other administrativa on the
mailing-list side of the road i presume.  I have downloaded RFC
6377 on DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Mailing Lists years
ago and read it.  Please let me wonder how many ML administrators
have read or even know about this RFC.
One could wonder whether the "massive pressure" of Sourceforge on
their mailing-lists had something to do with problems regarding
increased resource consumption and bounces due to this technology.
Many died, i moved to my own.

 |The point of DKIM is to add signatures in a way that won't screw up
 |the way the user handles her mail, and that will be robust in the face
 |of benign changes that happen to mail as it's relayed.  Given the
 |decades of installed base, I think we did about as well as we could.

It was not my intention to hurt Mr. Crocker personally.
Personally i do track OpenDKIM for some years, but never started
actually using it, no, i think a more holistic PGP or S/MIME that
includes the entire message is the better approach, for single
persons or company or MTA and maybe even DNS zone-wide, and you
could very well put such a public key into the DNS, too.

The thing is, everywhere your read and hear "email is dying",
"other communication approaches are better / safer / xy", "we have
to move on" (or something), not only maybe even "require less
work", whereas at the same time there are piles of among one
another unrelated RFCs for email protection.  That is status quo.
And i do not like that one.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
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