OT: DKIM signatures on email messages from lists.gnupg.org

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu> (from Mon, 12 Jun 2023  
21:54:45 +0200):

> Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote in
>  <20230612-landline-jawless-f2c113 at meerkat>:
>  |On Mon, Jun 12, 2023 at 06:45:37PM +0200, Alessandro Vesely via Gnupg-us\
>  |ers wrote:

>  |> Omitting subject tag and footer seems to me to be worse than From: \
>  |> munging.
>  |
>  |No it isn't. Changing the subject and adding the footer is a damaging
>  |anti-pattern from mid-nineties. If the end-user wants to filter mail, \
>  |they can
>  |do it based on the List-Id header or any other criteria. Lists that \
>  |still do
>  |this in 2023 need to be updated to no longer do this.
>
> That is your own biased thing to which i am totally opposed to.
> The traditional email way uses a single INBOX and dispatches

Nice that it still works for you, but god forbit that _I_ go back to a  
single inbox... and if I look at all the other IT people I know, I  
agree with Konstantin that most use-cases involve pre-filtering into  
some kind of hierarchy before looking at emails (some things have much  
higher priority than others and the graphical applications most people  
use have good support for a priority based process of looking at  
pre-filtered emails).

> non-deleted things from there (also automatically).  I am happy
> that many lists i am on continue to use that subject tagging, or
> reintroduced it, because i get a human-compatible overview with
> a single glance (already thread-sorted) when i look into my INBOX.
> This includes IETF lists, tuhs and coff, 9fans, oss-sec and many
> more.
> (Having said that lists i read like those from NetBSD never did
> anything such, and did not need to change anything to work in
> today's email world.)

As you are also on the FreeBSD mailinglists:
We had footers in there in the past (a quick check of messages from  
1999 and 2006 confirms this). In 2021 (around June/July it seems) we  
changed that, at least partly due to DKIM signatures failing (not sure  
if this was the only reason).

I do not remember any complains from users about this change (I'm not  
part of the FreeBSD postmaster team, but I had a discussion about  
failing DKIM signatures with them, and we get internal status reports  
from them from time to time). We never had subject munging in place.

With more than 100 public lists FreeBSD uses, and a lot of subscribers  
per list, I would say generally we can live without mail-munging by  
mailinglists. Those people which want to keep it the old way, are  
typically old and experienced enough (procmail/formail anyone?) to do  
their own mail-munging based upon existing header lines.

I also consider things like DKIM much more useful than a footer or  
other mail-munging.

Bye,
Alexander.


-- 
http://www.Leidinger.net Alexander at Leidinger.net: PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF
http://www.FreeBSD.org    netchild at FreeBSD.org  : PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF
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