>Under at least one of the proposals, it can be determined that "yes, A
>signed the mods, and if the mods are removed to re-generate the original
>message, B signed the original message".  If we have that, then I think
>the question becomes: if this is to be a DMARC-like scheme, how do we tie
>A's signature to some kind of relevant header field, since the "From:"
>header is already "reserved" for the original signer.

You don't even need to be able to tell what part of the message is
attributable to which party.  All you need to know is that the first
signer considers it to be close enough.

Remember the key axiom of mail reputation: you cannot say good things
about yourself, only neutral or bad things.  (This should be obvious
if you think about it for a moment, since any assertion a nice sender
can make, a nasty sender can also make.)  Good stuff has to come from
trusted third parties, and given the difficulty of establishing trust,
that means the number of third parties has to be small.

Hence DMARC answers the question "is this a bad message?" It only
tells you whether a message is so awful that the recipient should
throw it away.  Once it's passed that test, the recipient then does
whatever it does with any other mail to decide how spammy it is and
what to do with it.* If the SPF or DKIM identity happens to belong to
someone the receiver likes or trusts, that's fine but it has nothing 
to do with DMARC.

That means that if a message has passed through two entities or
mediators or whatever, the recipient does not care what part of the
message originated where because it's going to deliver or reject the
whole message, not the individual parts.  If my MTA gets a 419 from a
mailing list, it doesn't care whether the list is leaking 419s from
the original sender, or the list is 419-izing innocent mail.  It's
going to bin it either way.

That's why I made my double signing proposal the way I did, it's just
enough that the original signer can say, yeah, close enough.  The
other more complex proposals can tell the recipient lots of other
stuff, but it's not stuff that is useful to the recipient (except
perhaps for exotic forensic purposes) so there's no value to the
extra complication.

R's,
John

* - someone will probably disagree with this, but he is wrong

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