Subject: [saag] DKIM summary report (IETF 75)

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:52:00 -0400

The DKIM working group met on Tuesday afternoon.  The group's
chartered work is nearly done (the last document is in WGLC, and two
others are now in the RFC Editor queue), so the goal of this meeting
was to discuss implementation reports and draft-standard progression
for the base protocol.

Dave Crocker has posted implementation surveys to the mailing list,
but has so far gotten few replies.  WG participants were urged to
complete them, and to pass them on to others.  Barry will pass them to
MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) and urge response, as IETF
liaison to MAAWG.  Barry would like to collect data not only on
feature use by signers and verifiers, but also on what use the
verifiers make of the results.

There was much discussion about dropping unused or little-used
features in the process of going to draft standard.  We note that RFC
2026 *requires* dropping features that are truly unused, but whether
to drop others is a different question.  Several opinions were given
about keeping all features, because, while there's plenty of
experience with signing and verifying, knowledge of usage of the
result of verifying is still limited.  We don't yet know what
verifiers will decide is important, over time.  Counter-argument:
history shows that when we learn that, we'll find that the features we
kept purely speculatively will be the wrong ones anyway.

Informal vote showed approximately a 2-to-1 preference for keeping
*all* features, versus removing some.  Chairs don't consider that to
be sufficient for "rough consensus", so it will be discussed on the
list.  Pasi pointed out, and the chairs agree, that because we had
consensus on these to start with, the default action, lacking clear
consensus to remove a feature, is to keep it.

There was also discussion indicating that documenting DKIM use cases
could be helpful.  Perhaps this could be added to the "deployment"
document (in WGLC now), or perhaps using an easily updated wiki.

Barry Leiba (and Stephen Farrell)

---

From: Dave CROCKER <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:17:45 +0200

Barry Leiba wrote:
> The DKIM working group met on Tuesday afternoon. 

Barry,  Just wanted to thank you for writing such an excellent summary of the 
meeting.  I think you captured the salient points perfectly.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net