RE: Signed Receipts and Mail Lists

["Jim Schaad" <[e-mail]>]

Sean,

I have had many discussions with people on this issue.  It is very
likely that an MLA would return a receipt to the originator of the
message either on initial receipt (I got it and distributed it) or after
a specific percentage of people on the list have returned receipts.
This is the only way to handle receipts in the case of a mailing list
whose memebership is hidden from senders.  

This being said the problem here is that you are using a single
certificate for two distinct individuals (i.e. the two different mailing
lists) and asking somebody (the sender of the message) to try and guess
which indiviual was being refered to.  In this case each MLA should have
it's own certificate (and hopefully different key pairs) in order to
allow for distinctness of identity to be known.

Graeme,

If we adopted the solution you gave, what limits me from making
arbitrary statements about who I am in this field that then need to be
independently verified by the receipt processing code?  (I.e. what if I
put the fact that I am [e-mail] in this field and sign with my
[e-mail] certificate).

jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] 
> [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Graeme Lunt
> Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 12:40 AM
> To: 'Sean P. Turner'
> Cc: 'ietf-smime'
> Subject: RE: Signed Receipts and Mail Lists
> 
> 
> 
> Sean,
>  
> > I'm not sure that the MLA returns a receipt on behalf of the ML 
> > members.
> 
> OK - if an MLA should not return signed receipts then there 
> is not a problem with my scenario. 
> 
> > I looked through ESS again and I couldn't find anything 
> that said if a  
> > message enters an MLA with a signed receipt request that it
> 
> > shouldn't or should return a receipt.    
> 
> Is an MLA considered a "receiving agent"/"receiving 
> software"/"processing software" in section 2.3 of ESS? I had 
> assumed that it was but agree it is unclear.
> 
> > Typically (I think), originators want to know that the 
> final recipient
> got 
> > the message not whether the MLA got it.
> 
> I think there are arguments for both. If an originator sends a message
> to:
> 
> [e-mail]
> 
> the originator probably only wants to know that it got to the 
> complaints department at bigbank. The originator doesn't want 
> to know (and bigbank doesn't want to let the originator know) 
> which individuals within bigbank read the message.
> 
> > Then again maybe I didn't understand your scenario.
> 
> I don't think the originator needs to understand if the 
> addresses they are requesting signed receipts from are 
> address lists or not. If an originator sends a message to two 
> recipients - one a mail list, one an individual - and 
> requests first tier signed receipts, they will never receive 
> a signed receipt from the mail list recipient. The user may 
> find this unexpected. Correlation software *may* be able to 
> detect a mail list recipient and handle it appropriately.
> 
> 
> Graeme
> 
>