Discontinuing DomainKeys support

From: Murray S. Kucherawy <msk_at_cloudmark.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:54:44 -0700

This is likely to ruffle some feathers among the user base, but it's time to get the conversation started. I'll float it here first and then move it to opendkim-users if and when we reach some vague consensus.

I would like to drop support for DomainKeys at some point on our roadmap. There are many reasons:


1) DKIM is clearly the dominant standard and we should be encouraging the population to move in that direction. Yahoo! and Gmail, for example, treat the two equally, and Yahoo! has said it will discontinue support for DK as soon as the community is clearly heading in that direction.

2) DK support in software that we can make use of is limited, and the current leading C library (libdk from dk-milter) contains some bugs that won't be fixed anytime soon. We don't have the resources to fix it or support it on an ongoing basis.

3) DK doesn't have the built-in debugging features (e.g. "z=") that DKIM does.

4) Maintaining support for it in OpenDKIM is beginning to contribute to code clutter.

5) Probably other things I haven't thought of yet.

In my head I've got a goal of dropping support for it in 3.0.0, which means the next super-large feature set to go in all at once. But I don't have any idea what that would be or when it would be, so maybe 2.3.0 is a more definite and practical goal. I don't know yet what 2.3.0 would include either, but at least I can predict roughly when it would be, namely sometime in the first half of 2011.

Comments welcome.

-MSK
Received on Wed Jul 21 2010 - 22:54:57 PST