[Mailman-Developers] New RFC on using DKIM with MLMs

[Ian Eiloart]

On 25 Oct 2011, at 02:04, Barry Warsaw wrote:

> On Oct 13, 2011, at 11:41 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> 
>> There's movement afoot to deprecate use of "X-" in header field names.  Just
>> call it "Mailman-Topic".  And if it's worthwhile, consider registering it
>> with IANA.
> 
> I wonder if we should remove the X- prefixes for Mailman 3.  Here's a list of
> ones we still add or recognize (some might be used only in the test suite):
> 
> X-Message-ID-Hash

This could be replaced with DKIM sigs, I guess.

> X-Mailman-Rule-Hits
> X-Mailman-Rule-Misses

This might be useful for diagnostics, but probably wants to be off in general. My view is that Mailman should not be doing message filtering.

> X-BeenThere

I guess that's useful for avoiding list loops, perhaps?

> X-Mailman-Version

I think this should be replaced with X-Mailer, or even User-Agent. That's not currently an SMTP header, but I think it should be. And it is in quite widespread use.

> X-Mailman-Approved-At
> X-Archive

Does this do the same as List-Archive?

> X-No-Archive

What does this mean? 

> X-Ack
> X-No-Ack
> X-Peer
> X-MailFrom
> X-RcptTo
Isn't that usually in the Received header?

> X-Originally-To

Doesn't that do the same thing as List-post?

> X-Original-CC
What's the purpose of including this?

> X-Original-Content-Transfer-Encoding
> X-MIME-Version
> X-Mailman-Copy
> X-List-Administrivia

List-help?

> X-Content-Filtered-By
> X-Topics
> X-Mailer

I think we should use User-Agent here. Thunderbird does, as do some other mail clients. Or, we should push for introduction of a List-Agent header.

> X-List-Received-Date

Don't the Received headers carry this information?

> X-Approve
> X-Approved
> 
> -Barry

Generally, I think we should avoid the use of headers that duplicate other existing headers. Where we want to add more information, then extend the List-* header set if the information might be generally useful for mailing list software. Otherwise, use X-Mailman-* (or even Mailman-*) so that people know where the header came from.

-- 
Ian Eiloart
Postmaster, University of Sussex
+44 (0) 1273 87-3148