[Mailman-Developers] Crypto-sign to post

Nathaniel Gray n8gray at caltech.edu
Sun Nov 5 01:43:30 CET 2006


Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Nov 3, 2006, at 7:18 PM, Nathaniel Gray wrote:
> 
>> As
>> you can probably imagine, subscribe-to-post seriously annoys me.  I
>> can't tell you how many times I've done the "subscribe, disable
>> delivery, ask for CC on replies" mambo, and it's getting to the point
>> where I just won't bother unless I've got a serious issue.
> 
> I'm with you.

Glad to hear it!

>> I brought this up on the Cairo mailing list recently
>> <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-November/008345.html>
>> and Carl Worth brought up the idea of a simple option to accept any post
>> that's cryptographically signed, regardless of subscriber status.  I
>> liked this idea for several reasons.
>>
>> 1. I've never seen signed spam
>> 2. Most mail programs have some way to sign mails
>> 2. When spammers do start signing spam it allows a straightforward
>>     transition to a real web-of-trust style model.
>>
>> After a bit of searching I found RFE 893870
>> <https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=350103&aid=893870&group_id=103>, 
>>
>> which seems to have been dismissed on a technicality.  Are there serious
>> technical or philosophical problems with the idea, or is this just a
>> matter of finding somebody with the time and talent to do an 
>> implementation?
> 
> Given that this could be a posting option that list admins could choose 
> or not, I'm all for it.  I'd like to augment the "who can post to this 
> list" options with at least one other workflow: self-verification.  IOW, 
> even if you're not a member of the list, you would get a confirmation 
> message, which when replied to would enable your posts to the list, 
> without you having to subscribe.

That would help as well.  It would also be nice if Mailman would auto-CC 
replies to the sender if they aren't subscribed.

> This is clearly a Mailman 2.2 feature though, so if you decide to whip 
> something up, please do so against the trunk.

Sadly, I don't think I can volunteer for this.  I don't think it would 
be too tough to implement for somebody with the proper expertise but I 
don't have any serious experience with either mail, crypto, or the 
Mailman code base.  My hope is that somebody on this list does and 
perhaps understands the improvement this feature could offer.  At the 
very least I'm happy to hear that you're thinking about the 
subcribe-to-post problem.

Thanks,
-Nathan

-- 
 >>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
 >>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->


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