[Mailman-Developers] dkim-signature headers

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Michael Thomas writes:

 > I'm afraid that intransigence from the mailing list community is
 > likely to really backfire. Mailing list traffic is an extremely
 > small percentage of traffic, and most admins are likely to just
 > ignore the collateral damage if it's too much a nuisance.

We know.  Mailing lists have always been vulnerable to such collateral
damage by their very nature as bulk transports.

 > Don't get me wrong: I spend far too much of my day on mailing lists
 > and would really like things to work out. But hard line positions
 > in the face of thorny engineering tradeoffs doesn't help.

First, I don't speak for the Mailman community.  I fully expect that
the Mailman developers will recognize that they have no choice but to
provide DKIM-friendliness options.

Second, you can call me hardline if you like, but you're advocating
that we abandon RFC 2822's From-is-not-Sender semantics.  You're
advocating that the legitimate editorial role currently performed by
many mailing lists (analogous to the Editor reflowing lines and fixing
typos in letters submitted for the Op-Ed page) be reduced to mere
relaying.  This is pretty radical stuff, if you ask me.

The fact that you talk about the serious damage being done by mailing
lists removing signatures leads me to wonder what was happening to
unsigned posts on those mailing lists before they upgraded to a recent
Mailman.  And the fact that you completely ignore the existing trust
relationship that mailing lists have with their members in discussing
third party signatures makes me wonder how carefully you and your
colleagues have really thought about mailing lists.  (Especially since
that trust relationship has been explicitly pointed out!)

So I just don't see an existing best practice here.  I see an attempt
to develop an extension to an existing draft based purely on theory,
and theory not really grounded in current practice, to boot.  I worry
that an attempt to make Mailman conform to DKIM rather than write
list-friendly wording into the standard will cause the collateral
damage to be set in stone.