On 25 Feb 2004 at 12:10, Dave Aronson wrote: > On Wed February 25 2004 11:50, gnulinux@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > i am very much wanting dialogue > > around the issue of having the list digitally signed > > by the list processor. > > If the folks who actually run the list find themselves a spare moment to > breathe (not likely so soon before or after the meeting in Korea), it > might be fairly easy to implement. > > However, what does it gain us? Authentication that the message in > question, was indeed sent via the IETF list. What does THAT gain us? > The ability to separate it out from the spam. (Note also the > assumption that anything sent to, or at least received from, the IETF > list is NOT spam. That may hold for this list, but certainly not for > all.) my intention is to move in the direction of accepting only signed email. this will allow me to route anything that doesn't include a whitelisted signature to /dev/null. that's what having the list signed will gain me. FYI, i made no assumption that a signed list would not contain spam. in fact, i would be surprised if it did not. > On the other claw, using the Sender line for that purpose has been > working just fine for me. (It's forgeable, sure, but I see no sign > that spammers have bothered to do so, and don't think it's likely that > they will in the future.) That's also trivial to set up in any decent > MUA. Same holds for the List-ID, X-Been-There, and other markers used > by most other mailing lists. Most cannot filter so easily (or at all) > on the presence/absence or [in]validity of a digsig. Sure, advanced > tools such as procmail certainly can, but many of us don't even find it > necessary to use such things at ALL yet, and they're awfully difficult > for Joe Luser to set up for his mail from RANDOM-L. if signature validation is positioned at the mail server level then the tools you mentioned above can still be used. signature validation at the mail server level can add a header line to indicate signature validation status. additionally, if signature validation is located at the mail server level you might also choose to route all unwhitelisted mail to /dev/null so you don't have to download it. > Zero net gain, for at least some (and likely much) additional effort. > Why bother? again, for me a significant gain, and i perceive that generating a key pair and configuring automatic signing of all list traffic will require a minor amount of effort. david