[ietf-dkim] New Issue: ssp-04 Domain Existence Requirement

[Charles Lindsey]

On Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:39:46 +0100, Douglas Otis <dotis at mail-abuse.org>  
wrote:

> Add:
>
> ADSP defines a record that can advertise the extent to which a domain
> signs outgoing mail that is publicly exchanged on SMTP port 25, as
> described in [RFC2821]. Also, how other hosts can access those records.
>
> Advertisements, defined by this document, may also increase DKIM
> signature expectations for messages received by Mail User Agents
> (MUAs) or for messages which might have been exchanged over protocols
> other than SMTP. In some circumstances, author domains may wish to
> have accommodations for protocol failures or for mixed public protocol
> messaging not to be made.

That seems a convoluted way of dealing with the issue, and it seems to  
place the whole responsibility on the author domains (with no suggestion  
as to what "accomodations" they might employ), rather than on the  
Verifiers (actually, it requires a degree of common sense by both of them).

I earlier suggested a wording on the following lines:

I would suggest all that is needed in the present draft is a statement
that the existence check MAY be omitted in the case of TLDs that are known
not to exist in the global DNS system, with a pointer to RFC 2606 for some
examples (not to be construed as an exhaustive list). That leaves it to
Verifiers to use their Common Sense. Maybe a future document would make it
more specific, but that would cover us for now.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131                       
   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5