[Mailman-Developers] feature request: one-click setting to preserve DKIM

[Terri Oda]

On 12/06/11 11:17, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> It depends on your expectations.  If there's an expectation that the author's signature will/should/must persist through a mailing list, then I agree that they're largely incompatible.  If on the other hand you intend for lists to re-sign mail and for receivers to evaluate the message based on the list signature rather than the author signature, then it's entirely workable.  Of course, sometimes the author signature will indeed survive, and then you have two domains to evaluate instead of one.  Bonus!

There were a lot of "it depends" in your email, so maybe I've mis-read, 
but it sounds to me like the long-term path of least user/list admin 
hassle for Mailman probably is to just re-sign the messages.  Except 
that there's no standard for third parties doing re-signing, and no 
one's sure how to interpret it if we do?

As a developer, this sounds the makings of one of those life-sucking 
projects you shouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole unless you're getting 
paid to define and defend a standard.  There's no guarantee that 
anything we choose to do will ever be considered correct, and it could 
wind up being a lot of arguing and wasted effort at a time when I think 
we're better off just getting mailman 3 out the door.

Which is a pity, because this seems like a great opportunity for us to 
trailblaze and help correct a mistaken assumption in DKIM.  Maybe the 
other developers are a lot more excited about that than I am and willing 
to take the risk of implementation, but maybe we should just keep an eye 
on the expansion of DKIM and revisit this issue after Mailman 3 is released?

It sounds like our best option for the near future is to write up a nice 
little document describing the issue, Monica's fix for lists where DKIM 
is essential, and leave it at that as far as code goes until things move 
a bit closer to consensus on how DKIM should handle mailing lists 
long-term.  As a bonus, a nice little document could also be usable with 
2.1! If anyone needs wiki author permissions to do this, let me know.

  Terri