[Mailman-Developers] Crypto-sign to post

[Nathaniel Gray]

Hi Mailmen & Mailwomen,

I'm an open-source butterfly, flitting from project to project.  I ask 
questions here, contribute patches there, and report bugs elsewhere.  As 
you can probably imagine, subscribe-to-post seriously annoys me.  I 
can't tell you how many times I've done the "subscribe, disable 
delivery, ask for CC on replies" mambo, and it's getting to the point 
where I just won't bother unless I've got a serious issue.

The thing is, I don't blame the list maintainers for enabling 
subscribe-to-post -- it's just the only easily accessible solution to 
the spam crisis at this point -- but I would really like to see them 
have a better option.  Since Mailman has already taken over the world 
you guys are in a great position to give it to them!

I brought this up on the Cairo mailing list recently 
<http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-November/008345.html> 
and Carl Worth brought up the idea of a simple option to accept any post 
that's cryptographically signed, regardless of subscriber status.  I 
liked this idea for several reasons.

1. I've never seen signed spam
2. Most mail programs have some way to sign mails
2. When spammers do start signing spam it allows a straightforward
    transition to a real web-of-trust style model.

After a bit of searching I found RFE 893870 
<https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=350103&aid=893870&group_id=103>, 
which seems to have been dismissed on a technicality.  Are there serious 
technical or philosophical problems with the idea, or is this just a 
matter of finding somebody with the time and talent to do an implementation?

Thanks,
-n8

-- 
 >>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
 >>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->