Mangled and non-mangled TUHS mail lists

Steffen Nurpmeso steffen at sdaoden.eu
Thu Oct 5 06:17:44 AEST 2017


Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
 |On 10/03/2017 12:49 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> But mailing-lists are a, possibly the most vivid part of email
 |> since a very long time, and designing a standard that does not
 |> play nice with mailing-lists is grotesque.  I was not thinking
 |> about enwrapping the message, but rather of a mechanism like the
 |> stacking of Received: headers which also follows standard.
 |> Something like renaming all DKIM headers stackwise (DKIM ->
 |> DKIM-LVL1, DKIM-LVL1 -> DKIM-LVL2 etc.) and creating new DKIM
 |> headers for the updated message, also covering the DKIM stack.
 |> Something like that.  Like this the existence of a stack that
 |> would need to become unrolled would be known to verifying parties,
 |> which were all newly created for this then new standard.  A stack
 |> level could even be used to save-away tracked headers, like
 |> Subject:, too.  But SHOULD not.  ^.^  Anyway.
 |
 |I recently became aware that DKIM does have an option (l= length 
 |parameter) to specify how much of the body is covered by the DKIM signature.
 |
 |I wonder if this would help in what you're describing.
 |
 |It's my understanding that the motivation behind it is to allow things 
 |to append content to the body without breaking the DKIM signature.
 |
 |Granted, it would still protect other headers.

Nonetheless it is notable that even the IETF uses subject prefixes
for their own lists, for example [Spasm] (now dead).  It is just
too much politics and business interests and rooster, well,
sometimes even pissings, wouldn't you agree there.

I mean, it is a chain of trust: the user sends to the ML, the ML
verifies DKIM, performs adjustments and applies DKIM on its own,
including the stacked original data, but keeping From: intact.
What to do with added MIME attachments?  Into the great wide open:
apply or use Content-ID, add a DKIM header which mentions all MIME
parts of the original message in correct order, a DKIM verifier
can use that to select the MIME parts of the original message and
apply checksum verification on that very part only.  Would work,
huh?  What is missing from that, Mr. Taylor?

--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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