Bron, et al,
On 7/20/2025 12:26 AM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
On Sun, Jul 20, 2025, at 00:58, Dave Crocker wrote:
On 6/18/2025 2:15 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
But also, did a lot of thinking about how to support multiple
RCPT-TO in a single SMTP transaction.
Simple question: Why?
Simple answer - I spoke to someone from Microsoft about their
Enterprise architecture and the kind of mail usage patterns they see.
So, extensive and convergent conversation in the decision-making forum
for a working group is overridden by an undocumented, private
conversation one person had with some other folk who are easily able to
show up in the forum, but haven't.
Good to see that the working group process is functioning well.
There was extensive discussion about multiple recipients here, on the
working group mailing list, where decisions are made for the working
group's woirk.
I am pretty sure my reading of that discussions is accurate, which
simplifies to: the number of cases that currently use multiple
recipients is vanishingly small, and so such support is not essential.
*Adding mechanisms that are intended to support vanishingly small
portions of cases -- and especially where that support only provides
efficiency rather than necessary functionality -- is pretty much
always a terrible idea for a global standard.*
True, but we only have a fraction of the world's users on this mailing
list, which is why I've been actively trying to talk with people who
aren't here, but who do chunks of the world's email.
That's the way IETF processes work. Decisions are made by the group
that shows up and reach rough consensus.
Undocumented and frankly rather vague, second-hand reports are not
usually enough to alter working group rough consensus.
It adds complexity to everyone's code, needs testing and ongoing
support, and gets excercised infrequently enough to make it likely
that it won't actually work when it is needed. That is, it is
expensive and fragile.
And then there is the small matter of working group rough consensus
that runs contrary to the pretty-clear rough consensus that I thought
I saw before, /against/ support for multiple addressees in a DKIM
signature.
I was one of the driving voices behind wanting to simplify things to
only have one address, but I'm persuaded enough by the feedback I've
had about corporate email usage patterns that I feel it's worth
investigating how to better support them.
Your being persuaded is nice. What I don't understand is why it is
sufficient and why the working group did not pursue further discussions
of the trade-offs. Note that I cited additional costs, for example.
Are those to be ignored?
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
mast: @[email protected]
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