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

[Ned Freed <[e-mail]>]

> On 30-11-15 02:02, Christian Huitema wrote:
> > On Sunday, November 29, 2015 12:54 PM, Jim Fenton wrote:
> >> There are users for whom their privacy is critically important, such
> >> as press informants in totalitarian societies. There are many other
> >> ways to determine their location (network monitoring coupled with
> >> a STARTTLS downgrade attack, for one), and it would be harmful
> >> (potentially life-threatening) if anyone thought that this would truly
> >> protect them. They should be using something like SecureDrop and
> >> not using email at all.
> > Uh, No. This is the classic "the other side of the boat is leaking too"
> > argument, coupled with a dollop of "no security is better than imperfect
> > security." Yes, there are many ways for metadata to leak. But that does not
> > mean that we should not plugs the leaks that we do know about.
> >
> > The discussion so far shows that one hand many people believe that we are
> > disclosing too much metadata in mail headers, while many more believe that
> > the metadata disclosure is actually useful to fight various forms of abuse,
> > some of which may well compromise users' privacy.
> >
> > We also heard that some of the big providers have already unilaterally
> > decided to suppress some of the metadata, like the first hop address.

> Can anyone share some information about which providers made which decision?

I posted about this earlier on the perpass list in respose to the initial
discussion of the draft-josefsson-email-received-privacy draft. Here's an
updated version of that information:

Gmail:   Webmail does not disclose originating client IP, apparently using
         invalid Received: field to avoid doing so.
         Submit discloses originating IP.
Yahoo:   Neither webmail nor submit disclose originating IP, some Received:
         fields are invalid but this looks like an unrelated issue.
Outlook: Neither webmail nor submit disclose originating IP, valid Received:
         fields.
AOL:     Both webmail and submit disclose originating client IP in both
         Received: fields and X-Originating-IP: (webmail) and X-AOL-IP:
         (submit) fields.
GMX:	 Both webmail and submit disclose originating client IP.

Thanks John Levine for the AOL submit data.

				Ned