* Mike Demmers wrote: >If using default deny for encrypted email, they would simply have to >first send you a non-encrypted email that said something like "I would >like to exchange email with you confidentially and have added your >address to my 'allow' list, would you add me to yours?" > >Would this be a problem? Remember, this is email, and PGP - the fact >that they are contacting you is not hidden in either case, just the >actual content.
Back in the day it did not seem unusual for people to know about things like anonymous remailers or how trivial it is to manually deliver mails by typing SMTP commands into a console, including spoofing various bits of header data, so that did not seem that big an issue to me. There are a couple of problems with your approach above. One is knowing whether and when you have been added to someone's `allow` list. Another is that people can include the encrypted message in their request to be put on the `allow` list if they can somehow obtain the recipient's key, rendering the request redundant. Spammers can ask to be put on the list just like anybody else. >In the case of someone with no previous contact, if they tried to send >you encrypted email, they would get an immediate bounce with an error >message something like: That would be a bad default policy: can be abused to verify addresses, disclose encrypted email policy, recover parts of the white list if the mail system allows address spoofing, doesn't work when the receiving system is down for maintenance for an hour or two, mails might get lost when the sender switches addresses or uses a wrong one by accident, ... -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email protected] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ _______________________________________________ perpass mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/perpass
