accountable email

Fred Baker suggested he wanted an end-to-end identifiable sender.  I
want to generalize that and say that if I had to pick one thing that I
really, really wanted from the next generation email system it is
"accountable email."

And agreeing with Dave Crocker that we stick to non-technical
descriptions, as a receiving user of email I want a reliable and robust
identifier with which I can apply the policy of my choice.

That identifier is absolutely authentication, so whoever said that
authentication without authorization is useless was wrong.  I explicitly
need various elements of the infrastructure to provide perhaps various
types and levels of authentication.  As the receiver I'll decide if and
how I'm going to use that authentication.

The identifer might be end-to-end as could be provided by a digital
signature.  It might be a composite of hop-by-hop signatures.  It might
be something provided by an anonymous remailer asserting that the actual
sender wants to remain anonymous.  It might be something else.  It might
be all of these things.

The point is each of these types of identifiers mitigates a different
problem with the current email infrastructure.  If we had a common
format for such an identifier and various mechanisms and locations for
creating them then receivers would have many more tools available to
them to manage their incoming email.

Jim