I don’t think it’s a silly question. In fact I recently approached the Mailman people to explore this question from their perspective.
It may be interesting or even somewhat useful to set up a new header canonicalization that tolerates this kind of thing for lists, but the real problem is that, statistically speaking, a list that adds a mnemonic to a Subject: field in the way you’re discussing usually also does other things to the list that will change the body. The MLM draft we have approaching WGLC talks about several of these. It would be pretty complicated to construct a canonicalization that anticipates all or even most of those. Thus, fixing the mnemonic issue will only avoid a small number of broken signatures overall. I think a more interesting idea would be to use DOSETA to sign the MIME parts instead of or in addition to the whole message. I’m starting to plan out an implementation and will be looking for a couple of other sites interested in conducting some experiments. -MSK From: ietf-dkim-boun...@mipassoc.org [mailto:ietf-dkim-boun...@mipassoc.org] On Behalf Of Franck Martin Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 7:17 PM To: ietf-dkim@mipassoc.org Subject: [ietf-dkim] If DKIM would ignore [] at the beginning of the subject line Silly question (?): Knowing that many mailing lists add [topic] at the beginning of the Subject line, what if DKIM was set to ignore that part when signing/verifying? Would it help to solve the problem of broken signature thru mailing lists? I realize the issue would be to also detect the add footer, but if I recall you can specify in dkim to sign only a certain length of the body and not the whole body.
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