Re: [Shutup] [ietf-smtp] Proposed Charter for the "SMTP Headers Unhealthy To User Privacy" WG (fwd)

[Steve Atkins <[e-mail]>]

> On Nov 29, 2015, at 9:25 AM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 11/29/2015 9:12 AM, Chris Newman wrote:
> 
>> ====
>> This WG will investigate mechanisms to conceal the information exposed
>> by the submission client's IP address in the mandatory received header
>> generated by the submission server. The output of this WG will provide a
>> mechanism as effective at tracing abuse and fraud as current use of the
>> submission client's IP address. Changing other rules related to received
>> headers in SMTP is out of scope for this WG.
>> ====
> 
> 
> Chris's approach is reasonable, but I fear it is premature.
> 
> The foundational issue here is a trade-off between information hiding
> and information disclosure.  Privacy vs. ops support.
> 
> I've seen essentially no public discussions, here or anywhere else,
> about the technical aspects of this policy tradeoff.
> 
> Absent some community-based sense of the underlying technical issues
> here, targeting a specification is, in my view, not ready for prime time.

There are already providers who remove or falsify Received headers in
order to protect their users, so there is also the opportunity to look at
what is currently being done and the effects of it.

As one example, Gmail is one of those providers. (They're also consistently
the biggest source of B2B spam in my inbox.)

Cheers,
  Steve