Subject: Re: [ietf-smtp] New Mailing List to discuss email canonicalization?

From: "Kurt Andersen (b)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2016 09:32:45 -0700

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 8:44 AM, Ned Freed <[email-masked]> wrote:

> [after a discussion of subaddressing] . . .is the question badly posed,
> and should be "are these addresses under the control of the same user?"
>

One could also expand the question to question what the meaning of "same
user" is too. Take, for example, "[email-masked]" which might be handled
by one natural person in the morning and a different natural person in the
afternoon; or "[email-masked]" which might be handled entirely by an
automated system - is that a "user" at all?

--Kurt Andersen

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From: Ned Freed <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2016 10:17:56 -0700 (PDT)

> automated system - is that a "user" at all?

Exactly! The second you ask these sorts of questions you buy in to specifying a
boatload of semantics, which are likely to end in either something so specific
it's useless or so vague it's pointless.

Properties are easier to nail down because they can be constrained by specific
use-cases. Not easy, mind you, and the privacy considerations can be quite
tricky. But there's some chance of success, whereas with similarity questions I
see none.

				Ned