On Thu, 13 Aug 2026, Tero Kivinen wrote:
I think the whole idea of sender giving mandates to the whoever is receiving the email is wrong. The sender should NOT give instructions
In general I agree with you but that ship sailed a decade ago.
So instead of donotexplode the sender should say something like "onerecipient", meaning email was meant to be sent to one recipient.
It's just a token the software looks at. It could equally well be "qokxonr".
What is the intended use for the "donotexplode" flag?
Same as what you said, mail intended for a single recipient.
When would you be setting that flag when sending email?
Receipts, bank statements, password resets, anything that is clearly for one recipient.
Why would it be useful for you to send that flag?
To discourage mailing lists and the like from forwarding it if someone accidentally or maliciously sends it such a message.
Yes, I can see all spammers and phishing attacks using that flag, as they do not want anybody to modify their urls or adding ugly "this email is from external source" warnings to emails, but what other use there is for this flag?
Same as above. I don't want them modifying my password reset URL either. It's advice to systems that modify mail that this message is not one they should forward.
R's, John _______________________________________________ Ietf-dkim mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
