Subject: Certified email: comment on draft-gennai-smime-cnipa-pec-00.text

From: "Umberto Ferrara" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:08:39 +0200

Hi all
I'm a PEC technician and a component of the open source project
OpenPEC (www.openpec.org).

I would like to talk about the SMTP diagnostic in PEC systems.

I think that it could be very useful to enrich the PEC with a sort of
SMTP-diagnostic management feature and give more feedbacks to
the users, also in case of failed deliveries.

Suppose that a PEC users sends a message to a non-existent ordinary
recipient and that PEC provider system receives a SMTP 5xx error type.
If it doesn't propagate this error, the sender won't be able to know that
his message could not be delivered.

The solution could be forwarding the error message into an anomaly
envelope containing a short description of the problem

In this way the PEC user could receive negative feedbacks (failed
deliveries) in a homogeneous mode, i.e. with a PEC-format message
(anomaly envelope).

Best regards

-- 
[Umberto Ferrara]
_____________________________________
EXENTRICA srl
via Giuntini, 63
56023 Navacchio (PI)
tel:    +39 0575 19 39 163
fax:    +39 050  38 69 811

web:   http://www.exentrica.it
email: [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:25:43 +1300

"Umberto Ferrara" <[email-masked]> writes:

>Suppose that a PEC users sends a message to a non-existent ordinary recipient
>and that PEC provider system receives a SMTP 5xx error type. If it doesn't
>propagate this error, the sender won't be able to know that his message could
>not be delivered.
>
>The solution could be forwarding the error message into an anomaly envelope
>containing a short description of the problem

If it never gets to the end user that the sender has a (trust) relationship
with, how is key management for the anomaly envelope handled?

Peter.

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From: Shahin Alba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:21:32 +0100

> the users, also in case of failed deliveries.
Such Internet notifications are already handled by being inserted in 
anomaly envelopes and sent to the sending user.
To enhance the system by giving a more PEC-standardized specification of 
the error could be a good idea, but not all MTA implementations generate 
standard-formatted notifications (DSN - RFC 3461 - 3464).
This could be done in the future on a best effort basis.

--Alba

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From: Shahin Alba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:29:30 +0100

> with, how is key management for the anomaly envelope handled?

The "trust" relationship is not between users, but between (PEC) 
servers. So in this example, there is no "trust" relationship, since the 
receiver would be a normal user from the "outside" world wrt to the PEC 
system. This normal user will receive a PEC Transport Envelope signed by 
the sending PEC provider.

If, on the contrary, a message is sent from a source outside of the PEC 
system to a PEC user, the receiving PEC provider inserts that message 
inside an Anomaly Envelope and signs it.

--Alba