>1. they increase the liklihood that their messages would reach the >intended audience because recipients have explicitly allowed it to >bypass their spam filters. > >(because those recipients specifically said they want particular kinds of >advertising. there are people who need to receive narrowly-focused >advertising or find it useful)
People I know who want narrowly-focused advertising go out and sign up for it. This does not need assertions, DKIM, or anything else. DKIM and reputation systems could be useful for people to report whether mailers actually do what they said they would, but that doesn't need assertions either. In a system like usenet where everyone sees every message, assertions could be useful to pluck relevant messages out of the stream as it goes by, although topic tags aka newsgroup names seem to have done the trick for the past 25 years. In e-mail, this would make sense in a model where mailers spam out their stuff to every address in the known universe, recipients look at the flood as it comes in, reject the 99.99999% that they don't want, and accept the trickle with the right tags. I sure hope that's not what you have in mind. So once again, What Problem Are You Trying To Solve? >2. there were a penalty of some kind for not making assertions in some >circumstances (e.g. US laws requiring some kinds of messages to be >labeled as spam or sexually-explicit) Gee, by an amazing coincidence, someone with exactly the same name as you has published notes about what a bad idea porn tags are. When Korea mandated spam tagging, it opened the spam floodgates and ruined e-mail in Korea, perhaps permanently, even though the spam tag law has been repealed. If you don't believe in standardizing unsound existing practice, why in the world would you want to encourage this? R's, John _______________________________________________ ietf-dkim mailing list http://dkim.org
