[Bcc'ing dmarc, but directed to ietf-822, since that's where we appear to be having the discussion for the moment.]

These ideas about mailing lists have been rattling around in my head these past couple of days, and they're based on a bunch of design assumptions. So I figured I'd post my list of assumptions and see if anybody thought any of them were off in space.

1. The mailing list itself is going to have to participate in this in some way. There's no point in trying to design something for mailing lists that simply will not make any modifications.

2. In the end, we want mailing lists to be able to send messages that say "From: u...@originatingdomain.example.com" and not have to say "From: l...@listdomain.example.net".

3. If an originator sends mail to a mailing list, the originator is implicitly giving permission for the list to re-distribute the message "From:" the originator.

4. If an originating site allows its users sending mail to mailing lists at all, the site is OK with *any* mailing list re-distributing mail from its users. so long as the mailing list received the mail directly from the originating user through the originating site. That is, originating sites don't care about pre-vetting mailing lists; they just care that the mail sent by mailing lists came directly from their users.

5. For a recipient of mailing list mail, their site cares about whether the message they got came directly from the mailing list site, cares that the mailing list got the mail directly from the originating user's site, and cares that the mailing list got the mail relatively recently. For the most part, the recipient's site doesn't care how much has changed about the content of the message. The eventual recipient might care if the changes are in the extreme, but from a "is this spoofed spam" perspective, that really doesn't matter.

6. The mailing list cares about whether it got the message directly from the originating user's site.

7. An originating site would be willing to query (through a DNS lookup or otherwise) the first hop recipient for any message and stick something in the message that indicates, "This message came from originating user's site and was sent to recipient at such-and-so time", in order to facilitate #4 and #5.

8. The mechanism we use might need to chain: If I send to a mailing list A, which itself sends to another mailing list B, the eventual recipient will be able to see that the message it got came directly from B, which it got from A, which it got from me.

Anything I screwed up there? Any assumption I'm missing?

pr

--
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478

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