> On May 25, 2024, at 09:49, John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 24 May 2024, Jon Callas wrote:
>>> blank lines.) Maybe you can tell it's from a list and the crud is
>>> benign, or maybe you can't and you should treat it as suspicious.
>>
>> And yet, I didn't make up the word robustness, it's there in the spec as
>> Dave quoted.
>
> When I read the whole paragraph, the message I get is that l= is intended to
> survive mailing lists but it has many problems so don't use it. My
> recollection is that for a few features like l=, most of us found them
> useless, a few people really really wanted them, so that paragraph was a way
> to get the document out the door.
Well --- kinda? It's really hard to discuss "mailing list" as if it's a thing.
For example, there's Mailman (and there's a lot of crap in Mailman that is
related to how to do a mailing list in a world of signed messages) which is
very different thing from say, Google Groups, which is a very different thing
from (handwave) an exploder similar to what happens in virtual entry in Postfix.
Certainly, it's common (perhaps expected) that a mailing list will add a
trailer to a message. However, that's not the only thing a mailing list does,
and I don't want to go down that rathole in this thread. I'm happy to go down
it in another thread.
Lots of business mail has (or had) trailers put on them to declare that
scanning had been done, or bogus legal threats, or many other things. The
intent of l= was for the administrative domain to make an affirmative statement
about the content they are willing to be responsible for.
> I do not ever recall l= being an proposed as an invitation to recipient
> systems to do surgery on incoming mail. If anyone had ever suggested that,
> I'm sure I'm not the only list manager who would have been sure to strip any
> l= signatures to prevent downstream funny business.
Well, I do. As I said, it's the thing that turned me from being bewildered by
it to thinking it was a good idea. It's why I remember it. I think there needs
to be more surgery on emails in a number of places, but that too is a side
discussion. (Among others, Received: headers.)
>
>> 1) It appears that the issue with l= is that implementers are not doing it
>> correctly, ...
>
> If there ever was a correct way to use l=, there sure isn't now. But per
> your next message we seem to agree on the outcome.
Yes, I was thinking about it and was reminded by advice of an old boss/mentor
not to confuse the world one is in with the world one wants to see. Also
another situation where an idea that would have been a good one if implemented
correctly was implemented badly, so we removed it from the -bis on that.
Jon
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