draft-crocker-email-author has been presented to the ISE for publication
as an Experimental RFC in the Independent Submissions Stream.
While this idea was initially discussed amongst participants of DMARC it
quickly became obvious that there was not universal support for the
proposal, and that some experimental experience was needed to determine
whether implementers were interested and whether the approach was both
stable and secure. The author, therefore, suggested publication as an
Independent RFC to allow people to consider the idea over a period of
time.
Mostly the concerns within DMARC were about barriers to adoption. There
was also some expression of concern that it would not resolve the
problem because the new Author: field could get exactly the same
treatment that the From: field gets today. That could defeat its
utility, but isn't an actual conflict with existing IETF work.
This document makes clear in the Abstract and the Introduction that it
is an experiment. Furthermore, the registration of the new message
header (Author:) is requested from the Provisional registry consistent
with this not being an IETF standards track document. Additionally,
Section 7 of this document sets out the experimental goals.
The IANA allocation is from a registry marked "Specification Required"
(this document, as an RFC, would meet that requirement) with the DE
shown as Graham Klyne. To the best of my knowledge, the DE has not been
consulted so far.
The initial review by the ISE raised a number of minor points that led
to a revision of the draft.
Reviews were carried out for the ISE by Alexey Melnikov and Alessandro
Vesely. These led to some discussions and a further revision.
The final review by the ISE caught a few small points for clarification
and resulted in -03 and the -04 version that is presented for publication.