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What’s up with email at IETF 127
- John Levine Principal, Standcore LLC
11 Nov 2026
Email is the oldest widely used application on the Internet, but it continues to evolve. At IETF 127 four working groups will meet to improve the security and usability of mail, and two Birds-of-a-Feather sessions propose improvements in mail operations and the way users sign up for mail subscriptions.
The six different sessions highlight the ways that, despite its age, email remains an essential Internet service which is continuing to adapt to the changing Internet. The work builds on existing mail standards to provide new or easier ways to get work done.
Domain owners use DKIM to put cryptographic signatures on mail they handle, so recipient systems can more reliably tell where their mail is coming from . While DKIM has been widely adopted since RFC 6376 standardized it in 2011, it does not work well for mail that is modified by mail discussion lists, and signed messages can be “replayed” when a malicious party resends many copies of a signed message to others. The DKIM WG is developing DKIM2 which addresses these issues and is likely to be deployed starting in 2027.
(DKIM WG Session, 2026-11-18 00:30-02:30 UTC)
The MAILMAINT (Mail Maintenance) working group handles a wide range of small improvements to email. Its current work includes a way to move the contents of a mail account from one provider to another, clarifications to international (non-ASCII) email addresses, and ways to automate configuration of Email, Calendar, and Contact software.
(MAILMAINT WG session, 2026-11-18 22:00-00:00)
The JMAP working group has created a JSON based mail access protocol intended to supplant and perhaps eventually replace the ubiquitous but aging IMAP. It continues to extend and improve JMAP.
(JMAP WG session, 2026-11-19 17:00-18:30 UTC)
The SML (Structured Email) working group is standardizing ways to include structured data in email messages, ranging from calendar invitations to invoices to medical information. It uses the W3C’s existing schema.org vocabulary. The WG is defining the details of how to embed structured data in a message in a way that remains compatible with existing mail formats.
(SML WG session, 2026-11-20 17:00-19:00 UTC)
The MTAHOOKS BoF session proposes to standardize methods to add "hooks" to enable add-on modules to work with mail servers. It is inspired by the existing milter scheme used with the popular open source Sendmail and Postfix packages, but intends to be more flexible and better documented than milter.
(SML WG session, 2026-11-20 17:00-19:00 UTC)
The EVP (Email Verification Protocol) BoF aims to simplify the process of securely providing a user’s email address on a web site, to ensure the address actually belongs to that user. The user is often logged into her mail system in another browser window, so EVP is a secure way for a browser to let the mail system in one window verify an address a user is entering in another window. Some large webmail and browser developers have expressed interest so this seems likely to proceed.
(EVP BOF session, 2026-11-17 17:00-19:00 UTC)
If you’d like to join these sessions, registration for onsite or remote participation in IETF 127 (14-21 November 2026) is available through the end of the meeting, and recordings are available on the IETF YouTube channel, with proceedings from all the meeting sessions available via the IETF Datatracker.