Subject: marid-submitter-02: What is a SUBMITTER?

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 09:59:11 -0700

Hi,

to paraphrase another of my yesterday's questions, where the answer
did not make me happy. 

What is a SUBMITTER?

What's its meaning, its semantics? Why do you call it a SUBMITTER?
And why do you use a full e-mail address alike identifier if you use 
the domain part only? What's the left part good for?

I'm pretty sure this will cause confusion and misinterpretation.

First, it looks like an e-mail address, and there even might be an
identical e-mail address, but it _is_ not an e-mail address, because
it is never meant to be used as a recipient's e-mail address for any
e-mail. What's that left part good for? Why do you use it if it has no
meaning (at least none precisely defined in the draft)?

Second, it is not a legal statement about beeing the
submitter. Imagine the content of the message is offending or
violating law (e.g. child porn, terrorists message, etc.) What would
someone (e.g. a public attorney) keep from accusing the owner of the
given e-mail address? After all, this is the submitter, and isn't that
MARID thing a mechanism to verifiy the submitter? Isn't it evidence
that the sender agreed to be the submitter of the message?

Third: What is it actually? It is nothing more than a pointer to a
domain. It helps finding a domain which's MARID record covers the 
IP address of the sending MTA. That's it. Nothing more than that. 
Why don't you treat it exactly like that? Why do you give it some
meaning it doesn't have or appearance it doesn't meet?

regards
Hadmut