[ietf-dkim] Mailing lists and signatures (fwd)

[John R. Levine]

>> You're quite right, and I would extend it to say that any design that
>> relies on MUAs to do anything consistently is in trouble.
>
> That level of generalization can't be correct.  Otherwise basic 
> interoperability at the MUA level could not exist.

My MSA contains quite a lot of code to fix the mechanical mistakes in the 
messages that MUAs inflict on it.  MUAs do reasonably well at the things 
that people really depend on, e.g. putting the right strings in the From: 
and Subject: lines, and the right strings in the submitted envelope. 
These have to work, since if they didn't people couldn't send mail, and 
the MUA vendors would get complaints.

>From there, it goes downhill fairly rapidly.  Consider, for example, the 
wide range of garbage purporting to be HTML that they create for formatted 
mail.  Validating S/MIME signatures appears to fall in the range of 
features that are nice to have, but not a big deal if they don't really 
work.

R's,
John
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