On Oct 30, 2008, at 9:26 AM, John R Levine wrote: >> I think most of the likely candidate domains for using >> "discardable" would disagree with your assertion John. > > Then I have to say that they don't understand what discardable > means. Really, it says feel free to throw our mail away if you have > the least doubt about it. This chronic misconception is the main > reason that I doubt that discardable will be useful in practice, > since only a small fraction of people who assert it will truly > understand what they've said.
The term "discard" in RFC 5321 is used to mean the silent dropping of information. In the prior note you said "It's really only useful for banks and places like Paypal sending out notices about accounts, not for any domain with individual users." As Michael suggested, these domains will not want to have their messages silently discarded. The term "discardable" suggests permission to violate RFC 5321 Section 2.1 MUST accept responsibility for either delivering the message or properly reporting the failure. This same MUST is echoed in Section 3.6.3 , 4.4 and 6.1. Section 6.2 provides advice on making an exception. ADSP will affect _all_ messages from the domain. Few customers will welcome messages from similar domains by the same institution. Customers that have opted to go paperless will be negatively affected by "discardable" since this affects all communications, even those considered extremely important. Unless DKIM signatures are so robust that _any_ type of failure provides very high confidence that the messages are seriously fraudulent, then the silent discard is not the best choice. If some institution ever had a problem with their DKIM signatures, how will they become aware of the problem when _all_ their messages are being silently discarded? At least two people on the DKIM list suggested that this term would be problematic. Instead of "Discardable", "Dismissible" would not imply that not reporting a failure is now allowed. -Doug _______________________________________________ NOTE WELL: This list operates according to http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html
