Subject: RE: [Asrg] Mail Cookies Was: Single-User Addresses

From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 16:33:25 -0500

Hadmut wrote:
> I disagree.
> There are many MUAs and mail handling programs which can't cope with
> + mail addresses and fail to sort mails, recognize senders etc.
	Disagree if you wish. While "many" don't, "many" do... For
instance, my mail server and client (Outlook Express) had no problem
receiving the mail you sent with a From field that looked like:

	From: [email-masked] 
	[mailto:[email-masked]] 

	Thus, while some servers and clients may have problems, I can
assure you that many people are able to handle single-user emails today.
Additionally, it is a fairly small change to existing systems to have
them adopt the existing convention of ignoring text between the "+" and
"@" symbols.
	Any solution that relies on a new header field will require that
changes be made to both sender's and receiver's software. Thus, as I
pointed out in my earlier message, such solutions will require
significantly more design as well as longer propogation time before they
are available to substantial numbers of people. On the other hand, a
solution based on "single-user" addresses is useful immediately to a
large number of people even if not to everyone. The key to making it
more broadly useful is simply convincing more mail providers to adopt
the already existing convention of ignoring content between the "+" and
"@" characters.
	Single-user addresses work for many people today. Anything based
on a new header field won't work for anyone for a long time. I think the
solution that works for some today is superior to a hypothetical
solution that is useless until some date in the far future...

		bob wyman

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

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From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 22:41:00 +0100

> them adopt the existing convention of ignoring text between the "+" and

As the experiment just proved: Not even this ASRG mailing list can 
cope with it...

Hadmut

---

From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 17:28:05 -0500

Hadmut Danisch wrote:
> As the experiment just proved: Not even this ASRG mailing 
> list can cope with it...
	Your experiment proves nothing other than that this mailing list
software works as advertised. When you registered for the mailing list,
you told it the email address that you would use when sending messages.
The address you gave it did not include the key, thus, your message was
put in the approval queue. I haven't tested it, but I wouldn't be
surprised if things would have worked well if you had registered as
"[email-masked]" rather than as simply "[email-masked]".
	In any case, this particular problem only happens when the
receiving software has implemented a white list (as this mailing list
software does) and if you have inserted the signature into the "FROM"
field. The same problem will not happen, however, if you leave your FROM
field as your base address (no signature) and only insert the signature
into the "Reply-To" field.
	If this message reaches the list, it will prove that a signature
embedded in the reply-to field does not interfere with mailing
processing. Since I've modified the reply-to heading for this mail to
include a "signature." Many people will, in fact, be able to benefit
immediately from single-user addresses. One will simply need to avoid
supplying such addresses to mailing lists or users of systems that don't
support the things. This is not ideal, but it is better than waiting for
a few years for new headers to be supported broadly.

		bob wyman

-----Original Message-----
From: Hadmut Danisch [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2003 4:41 PM
To: Bob Wyman
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Mail Cookies Was: Single-User Addresses

> 	Disagree if you wish. While "many" don't, "many" do... For
instance, 
> my mail server and client (Outlook Express) had no problem receiving 
> the mail you sent with a From field that looked like:
> 
assure 
> you that many people are able to handle single-user emails today. 
> them adopt the existing convention of ignoring text between the "+" 
> and "@" symbols.

Hadmut

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 19:08:19 -0800 (PST)

Actually, I find the idea of "mail cookie" rather interesting, it creates 
standard way for whitelist-like verification and it also solves the 
problem with displaying address on the website to be used by your 
customers to send email immediatly but not necessarily be able to get 
collected and used by spammers in the future. I personally had somewhat 
similar idea with using public key embedded in the email address.

And while need of faster solution does exist, we should not discurd solutions 
that require more time. Also do note that everything changes, we had HTML 
1.0, then 2.0, 3.0, etc all not being entirely compatible with each 
other. That email has survived for so long with so few changes is at best 
surprising. But serious changes do take long long time to implement and 
go from development to production to wide acceptance so if long term 
solutions is adapted we need to think about recomendation for short-term 
solutions as well, in fact probably both short-term and long-term plans 
should discussed at the same time and not considered in opposition to each 
other.