J. Gomez writes:

 > I can understand the welcomed vs unwelcomed thing, but I do not
 > agree with calling the alteration "decoration" in one place but
 > "corruption" in the other.
 >  
 > Loading the language in such a way is asking for a given conclusion
 > even before the debate has started. That's not fair (I'm not
 > predicating that from you, Matt, just talking in general terms).

What Yahoo! did wasn't fair, either.  I'm just responding in kind,
partly because some people define "legitimate" as "conforming to
standard" so "legitimate alteration" vs. "illegitimate alteration"
doesn't convey the same meaning.

Anyway, I intend to continue using "corruption" vs. "decoration"[1]
because I believe that they convey exactly the nuances I want.  Not
merely "unwelcome" vs. "welcome", but a corrupt From: breaks both the
user's model of email and RFC 5322 semantics, while a decorated
subject or footer breaks neither.  (Decoration can break DKIM and PGP,
however.  The practice of decorating list posts long precedes
signature technology, though, so I consider that to be a defect in the
signature protocols, or at least their common implementations.[2]
IMHO YMMV, there.)

Footnotes: 
[1]  I don't claim to be the originator of either terminology, but I'm
definitely using them consciously.

[2]  PGP can be worked around by placing the signed body in a separate
MIME part from the header and/or footer parts, and DKIM could at least
be adapted to decorated subjects using z= and footers using l=,
although this would require MUA support to be at all realistic (and if
John Levine's most pessimistic assessment of typical users' ability to
interpret MUA signals is correct, these workarounds are too dangerous
to be used).



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