On Feb 18, 2009, at 3:11 PM, John Levine wrote:

>> Disagree.  One such use case is noted in the draft, where an domain  
>> has a premium service and a free service, and tags signatures  
>> accordingly so that users of the premium service avail themselves  
>> of the better reputation that service might have.
>
> Right, but that has nothing to do with i=.  They'll use something  
> like d=foo.example and d=premium.foo.example.  The reason they do  
> that is because that's the way to ensure that receivers will see  
> them as two streams.

While segregating reputations through the use of signing sub-domains  
to that of an email-domain might be how DKIM could be used, it would  
be establishing a dangerous precedent to also consider this to be a  
means to meet the goals established by the DKIM charter of preventing  
domain spoofing.  This would suggest sub-domains are authoritative for  
parent domains. :^(

>>  Suggestion: leave i= opaque, and let's see what operators (on both  
>> ends of the transaction) do with it.
>>
>> But i= isn't opaque, not as a whole anyway.  It has the syntax of  
>> an email address, and the domain part of that address MUST be the  
>> same as or a subdomain of the d= value.
>
> I fear you may misunderstand what opaque means.  There are similar  
> syntactic constraints on message ID's, but they're just as opaque.   
> A receiver can verify that the field meets the mechanical rules, but  
> that doesn't tell you anything useful about the field's semantics,  
> it just tells you whether the sender has broken software.

Perhaps a better way to state what is meant when there is no direct  
association between that of the signing domain (d= value), or that of  
the "on-behalf-of" identity (i= value) would be to describe these  
values as either "Associated" or "Unassociated".

When the d= value can not be associated with an email-address domain  
(where even parent domains would also be excluded), it would represent  
a third-party signature.  When the i= value can not be associated with  
that of an email-address, there should be no expectations that it  
references a valid destination.  It seems both inaccurate and counter  
productive to describe the d= value as ever being opaque, and it seems  
safe to do so for the i= value only when not associated with other  
email-addresses within the message.  Please do not overlook the  
intended goal established for DKIM so soon.

-Doug

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