Following are some notes about gray areas in the RFC 4871 DKIM specification. Section 3.4.4 "relaxed" Body Canonicalization Empty bodies. Unlike the "simple" body canonicalization, which explicitly says to add a CRLF, the "relaxed" body canonicalization does not say this. The consensus at DKIM-Interop was NOT to add a CRLF for "relaxed" body canonicalization when the body is empty. Section 3.5 "i= Identity of the user or agent" In the section describing "identity", it says dkim-quoted-printable encoding is to be used, but quoted printable is not mentioned in the ABNF. The ABNF includes the "Local-part" token, which allows a quoted string with backslashes to escape certain characters. My interpretation (combining the text and my own reasoning), is that the i= tag value should be the dkim-quoted-printable encoding of: [ Local-part ] "@" domain-name So, e.g. local part domain ---------- ----------- i="meet=20joe"@example.com => "meet joe" example.com i="fine=3Bmess"@example.com => "fine;mess" example.com i="j=20s=22@example.com => "j s" example.com i=j smith @ example . com => jsmith example.com Section 3.6.1 "granularity of the key" Does "an empty g= value never matches any addresses" mean that any signature, no matter the i= value, using this key cannot be matched? The consensus at DKIM-Interop was that YES, that's what it means. It should be noted that this is an incompatible change from RFC4870-DomainKeys, where an empty g= tag in the public key is equivalent to g=*, which would match anything.