Re: [Bimi] Proposal to Clarify Role of MUA in BIMI Evaluation

[Todd Herr <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 8:54 AM Richard Clayton <[e-mail]>
wrote:

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> In message <[e-mail]
> il.com>, Todd Herr <todd.herr=[e-mail]> writes
>
> >    I'm not clear on what you mean by the phrase "magically available
> >    for fetching" here.
> >
> >    The current draft of the BIMI specification describes a "BIMI
> >    Assertion Record" (
> >
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-brand-indicators-for-message-identification#section-4.2
> >    ) as a relatively straightforward DNS TXT record, one making use of
> >    a tag-value syntax, not unlike a DMARC policy record.
>
> Exactly ... it requires the DNS record to still exist and short of magic
> I know of no way to achieve that for ancient email.


At this point in time, even magic wouldn't help, because there'd have been
no BIMI record in existence at the time the ancient mail was
sent/delivered, for some values of ancient, because BIMI didn't exist at
the time. Even going forward, there will be cases where a domain owner sent
messages before they chose to publish a BIMI record, and I don't believe
that those messages that are older than the domain's BIMI record should
have a logo displayed, but DNS doesn't have a wayback machine of which I'm
aware.

>
>
Recall that just two days ago you were discussing a "real-world
> scenario" involving changing phone and your mail client being faced with
> 9GB of stored email
>
>      How many messages should the Mail client try to do BIMI validation
>      on before the battery on my phone is exhausted and/or the iPhone
>      becomes a smoldering pile of melted plastic and silicon?
>
> the answer to the question BTW would be "as many as were about to be
> displayed" (since the only value of BIMI is to provide images and if an
> email falls into the forest of the far reaches of your inbox it won't
> just make no sound, but it won't display an image either!)
>


The answer to "as many as were about to be displayed" is
implementation-dependent. There are currently BIMI implementations where
the mailbox provider displays logos only when the message is opened, and
others where the logo is displayed in the folder list view as well as when
the message is opened. An MUA choosing to display logos in the folder list
view and caring not a whit for when the sender's messages qualified for
BIMI would potentially be about to display a great number of logos,
although I confess I am no longer a coder and I have no idea what kind of
resource consumption that might entail.

-- 

*Todd Herr * | Technical Director, Standards and Ecosystem
*e:* [e-mail]
*m:* 703.220.4153

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