[ietf-dkim] The mystery of third party signatures

[Franck Martin]

----- "Barry Leiba" <barryleiba.mailing.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike says...
> > All of this is rather academic though: the big guys are signing now
> because they can
> > find some biz justification to do so. Until that biz justification
> percolates down,
> > it doesn't really make much difference what we do. When it does, the
> DNS "problem"
> > will evaporate.
> 
> I think this is really the bottom line.  Deployment difficulties and
> delays always show up with new things.  If the new thing becomes
> popular, the difficulties go away, and we wonder why we ever had
> trouble with them.
> 
> S/MIME has been brought up as an example of the difficulty, and it
> actually helps show how this works: there isn't much trouble with
> S/MIME any more, not directly.  Most mail programs support it now
> (alas, not Gmail), and the level of interoperability is good.  The
> trouble now isn't with S/MIME, but with certificate distribution and
> management.  There's also very little need for most people to use
> S/MIME with most of their email.
> 
Which was exactly my point, the implementation part of s/mime at the user level is so cumbersome that no ones bother. The defection of the NOGs (and other groups) from the IETF removes a certain level of reality check to somehow good protocols.

Similarly, it seems to me, for DKIM to work on mailing list, mailman would need to work in a very specific configuration that no mailing list is currently using.