We seem to be having a discussion with some premises misunderstood, so
let me attempt to answer your message upside down, in hopes of undoing
that:
On 19 Jun 2020, at 15:07, Dave Crocker wrote:
On 6/19/2020 12:02 PM, Pete Resnick wrote:
On 19 Jun 2020, at 13:38, Dave Crocker wrote:
But typical mediators are trying to maintain a sense and ability for
the original author and the final recipient to experience an
end-to-end message exchange.
Yep. That's the point I was trying to make.
Except you seem to be pressing this as essentially a requirement they
have
Ah, no, I think that's the crux of the misunderstanding: I was
responding to Alessandro, who I interpreted to be saying that *all*
mailing lists were, by definition, publishers, defining a publisher like
a newspaper, where the true author of the content are the folks in the
masthead, even though they acknowledge individual authors in the
by-line. I disagree with that view. Indeed, I think for most of the
mailing lists we have been referring to in this discussion, they are not
publishers in Alessandro's sense, but rather view themselves as
redistributors of author messages. As 5598 points out, there is variance
in how much "editing" is done by any given mailing list, but again, for
the discussion we've been having about how the From: field should be
used, we've been talking about mailing lists which do the sort of
minimal editing of messages.
(For mailing lists that do more substantial editing, I may not be as
motivated to keep the From: field unchanged. If we get more deeply into
the discussion, it might be useful to start drawing more distinct
circles around types of mailing lists.)
So the purpose of pointing to 5598 was simply to explain to Alessandro
that redistribution of messages through the transport system does not
ipso facto make something a publisher.
whereas I'm pressing it as a business decision
I'm not really sure what that means or how it is relevant to the
discussion, but again, I think we've been talking past eachother for the
last two messages.
not something inherent in the nature of mailing list behavior.
No, sorry. I meant to simply point out the converse: That becoming a
publisher is not in the nature of mailing list behavior.
That said, I do disagree with the reasoning given with regard to why
5321.MailFrom has changed: It's not because of the authorship, but
rather because it is responsible for the submission onto the network,
just as the ReSender is in 5.2.
I did not anything about MailFrom, or for that matter anything about
any field with an identifier.
I didn't say you had. I brought it up only because I re-read the section
in 5598 on mailing lists, and it makes this claim. Just objecting in
passing (because it seems to support Alessandro's view), not because I
thought you were making some claim about it.
I'm guessing that your reference is to the fact that a mailing list
service might put its own address into the MailFrom, so it gets
handling error messages? That issue and behavior predates DMARC by a
lot. Probably two decades. Maybe more.
I agree. Which is why I thought it relevant to the overall discussion.
It was not directed at a particular statement of yours.
But in terms of the layer above (the 5322 layer), it is usually the
same message; see the second Note: in RFC 5322 section 3.6.4:
Note: There are many instances when messages are
"changed", but
those changes do not constitute a new instantiation of
that
message,
Except that there are many instances when messages might be changed
that DO constitute a new instantiation of that message, and 5322 gives
no guidance about what determine one versus the other.
That's not true. In what you elided:
In all
cases, it is the meaning that the sender of the message wishes to
convey (i.e., whether this is the same message or a different
message) that determines whether or not the "Message-ID:" field
changes, not any particular syntactic difference that appears (or
does not appear) in the message.
It doesn't give any algorithmic guidance, if that's what you meant.
None of which is relevant to the point that a mailing list service has
its own agency and is free to do what it wishes to and with the
messages it is re-posting.
Well, it seems exactly to that point. See above.
That most seek to preserve essentially all of the author's text is
fine, but whether and how much is more of a 'business' decision than a
technical one.
We appear to be in violent agreement, as the quip goes. Importantly, I
think we agree that if a mailing list decides to preserve the original
From: field, in an attempt to preserve all of the author's semantics,
they are not "doing it wrong", as Alessandro's message appears to claim.
I didn't mean anything so nit-picky. I mean that they are providing
a value-added service to users and have their own agency to decide
what that service looks like.
Again, exactly supporting my point: If a mailing list desires to provide
the service of redistributing mail with its original semantics, that's a
fine thing for it to do, and not something that should be rejected as
having been done wrong for the past 40+ years.
If they want to do assorted message modifications that are
substantial, and if users of the service like the nature of those
modification, the service is free to do them.
Of course. And the protocols we produce should be able to support both
scenarios, not dismiss one (rather widespread) way of doing things.
But for most mediators, large substantive (for interesting
definitions of "substantive") changes are outside of the scope of
their definitions, and would probably invite someone to say, "That's
not being a mediator." Certainly that would happen in the case of an
alias or a resender.
If there is a specification that would move such a declaration out of
people's personal opinions and into objective, technical assessment, I
apologize that I don't know what it is.
I believe 5322 makes quite clear what a resender mediator is. For alias
mediators, I'd have to go look if there is anything beyond 5598's
description. We have historically been quite resistant about defining
mailing list behaviors, for assorted reasons.
The degree to which the mediator asserts itself more visibly to the
recipient is probably the degree to which it looks more like a
publisher and less like a simple relaying service.
And eventually, I would contend, less like a mediator.
I probably wouldn't like it either, but we don't have objective
criteria for accurately and reliably applying or withholding the term,
do we?
I'm not sure if "liking" it has any bearing on the discussion, and I'm
pretty sure we don't have criteria that will take any arbitrary behavior
and count it as in or out, but I think I can give you examples of action
which you (and most of us) would agree would not fall into the criteria
and others that would. Just because a definition is fuzzy doesn't make
it useless.
pr
--
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best
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