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Comment by md_ | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's the core disagreement at all. You're being too unspecific about what "from" you are talking about. :)

All the YouTube.com DKIM signature says is that YouTube.com did in fact author this content. Which is true!

ARC and SPF (both present on this message!) indicate that the last hop was not YouTube.com, and who the last hop was! So all the information you were asking for is in fact present here.

What you are suggesting is just a different phrasing of your prior suggestion: that people should not be allowed to forward email. And given this message has an ARC header that indicates it was forwarded, and from whom, it seems really strange to me to say that instead of messages that indicate they were forwarded, you think we should just ban forwarding entirely.

Maybe the problem is on Gmail's MUA: maybe this should be more prominently shown to the user as a forwarded email?

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I'll try using different terms, in hopes that'll help:

* The author of the email is <no-reply@youtube.com>, verified by DKIM.

* The sender of the email is <postalerts@robtoledoyour.com>, verified by TLS.

If the author and the sender are the same, then there's no problem -- that's who the email is from.

If the author and the sender are different, you think the email is "from" the author, and I think the email is "from" the sender.

IMO whether the content was originally authored by YouTube might be interesting in some vague abstract chain-of-trust sense, but it's not useful to me as a consumer of email. I want to know (1) why some message came to arrive in my inbox and (2) who sent it to me. The desired UX is something like this:

  [postalerts@robtoledoyour.com] Updates to YouTube's Terms of Service

(ideally also tagged as spam due to the mismatch between author and sender)

An analogy might be physical mail. If I receive a copy of Dante's Inferno in my mailbox, then I expect the return address to describe the person who put my address on the shipment. It would be beyond useless for the return address to say "Dante Alighieri, Italy" even though that is an accurate description of the work's author.

As a nitpick, TLS does not indicate the sender of the email.

You can try using different terms, but the standard terminology in the mail space is "envelope From" vs "header From", as I used above. These are different things, and there's enough information in this email for you to know which is which.

Some MUAs--like Outlook--would render this email as

"Sent by postalerts@robtoledoyour.com on behalf of no-reply@youtube.com"

As I said, it may be that you want your MUA to do that, in which case...use Outlook? But this has nothing to do with limitations of SMTP.

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