Re: Summary of Issues Raised to date

On Mar 16 2004, Philip Miller wrote:
> I just had a thought: Is there any reason that respondents should want the
> tags to appear in outgoing response messages? Is there any reason that a

Just for the record (it's obvious, and you probably don't mean that):

A practical reason? The MUA is probably not aware of the tag in the
subject, certainly not if the message was proxied transparently by
some filter like POPFile. So obviously, the tag is part of the subject
from the MUA pov, and gets copied out again when a reply is sent.

In an ideal world, tags should be stripped at the sender end, too, but
that requires getting all the MUAs to do something new. If the filter
strips tags whenever it sees them, you're half way there without
requiring work from other players. If they do it too it's a bonus.

> message originator should see how his recipient(s) tagged it?
> I think these 2 cases provide a strong justification for stripping/replacing
> tags at the recipient end, and stripping tags at the sender side.

You seem to argue more in terms of privacy. That's a good justification for
stripping. In fact, your point opens yet another issue: If spammers
hijack a relay and read messages in transit, they can in principle
learn what sorts of tagging is done on messages to and from an organization,
and then they can mass spoof those tags in their own mails.
It's debatable whether that's effective, but it's an attack vector.

--
Laird Breyer.