[feedback-report] ARF working group interest?

[John R. Levine]

>> So would there be interest in a standard way for 3rd party mail clients 
>> to know where to send a report to their provider, who could then send 
>> it on to the originator if they chose to?
>
> Yes, definitely.

It's an interesting challenge to figure out how to do that in a way that 
will work, will be resistant to misuse (e.g. spammers providing fake 
info), and won't require major surgery to existing mail software.

Since it is quite common for a single MUA to collect mail from multiple 
accounts, it's important that there be an address per provider, not just 
one address per MUA.  My copy of Thunderbird, for example, collects mail 
from Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, and my own mail server, which may be a 
bit extreme but should still work.

I can think of two general approaches.  One somehow adds the report 
address to the per-account config, the other to the messages.  I'd prefer 
to do the config, except that config is already a painful swamp which 
isn't likely to be drained any time soon.

The other is to add a trace header to the top of each message along the 
lines of

  ARF-Info: to report at corp.bigisp.com auth someuser at bigisp.com
      via submithost.bigisp.com:587

It's a trace header so the top one wins, deterring fakes. The idea of the 
auth clause is to give the MUA a hint about which account to use.  If the 
auth doesn't match one that the MUA already knows, there's no button for 
this message.

I realize this is kind of a kludge, but this at least avoids adding more 
config state to MUA setup.  Autodiscovery sounds like a great idea, but 
I'm having trouble figuring out how it would work unless you want to 
extend POP and IMAP with commands to fetch extended config info, which I 
fear would have serious political problems with the keepers of the POP and 
IMAP specs.

R's,
John