Anonymous usage stats

From: Murray S. Kucherawy <msk_at_cloudmark.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:26:14 -0700

This is a potentially contentious issue, I would imagine, but it's something that might be very useful to the DKIM community at large:

If you're watching the ietf-dkim mailing list, you know that one of the biggest issues with DKIM advancement right now is a general lack of data about deployment experience so far. It seems to me that as one of the open source versions, our user base might be in a good position to provide some useful data here.

If we were to have an off-by-default feature that gathered statistics about DKIM and ADSP results and periodically sent them to us, it might be very useful in determining how useful certain parts of DKIM are (e.g. how many "l=" tags we see on signatures, how much mail apparently sent to lists has a broken signature, how much we see ADSP, etc.). The trick would be coming up with a method of doing so that's as sensitive to privacy concerns as possible. By being off-by-default, users would have to decide they want to reveal some data, and we would of course document completely the data being collected and the risks of revealing it, but also the possible community benefits.

Is this a good idea? Would it be too hard to get right? Anyone else have a better idea?

We do have at least two very large ISP "customers" that only use the library, so I'd need to approach them directly about getting stats from them. I'll do that separately.

-MSK
Received on Mon Oct 19 2009 - 17:26:24 PST