Mailing list administrivia

[Fairlight]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 05:05:05PM -0700, filePro Mailing List thus spoke:
> 
> The Mailman program worked nicely without any change from 1 Oct
> 2006 until August 2014 when about 40 subscriptions to the list
> were automatically disabled because of multiple bounces when the
> subscriber's provider started using DMARC to deny messages from
> servers that weren't listed for the Sender's domain.  That
> version tried to guess which email services were using DMARC, and
> only munge the From: address to those servers.

That makes no sense.  The DMARC RFC is from March 2015.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7489

Whatever happened in August shouldn't have to do with something which was
drafted the following March.

> If you can reason with Yahoo!, AOL, Comcast, etc. you're a better
> man than I.  I don't tilt at windmills, or waste my time trying
> to change them.

That's just the thing.  Were it me, I'll tell users of email addresses at
those providers to get a different email provider, or punt.  As long as
there are other email providers out there (no shortage), I'd say screw 'em.
I wouldn't even tilt; I'd just ignore it, especially since it's not an
official standard.

I've been waiting to see how this pans here on this list out over time.
I'm thinking of unsubbing, and have been since this started.  I just
haven't wanted to do anything rash.  However, the usefulness of a mailing
list under these conditions is questionable at best, unless you go to
contortions to rewrite the headers on the receiving end.  And not many
actually have that ability.  I bet there are under a dozen of us here
who have both the knowledge and the actual resources (access to deliver
or procmail configuration and use, which is rare unless you have a shell
account [of which there are few providers] or run your own MX host), who
can actually do it.

It's no reflection upon you personally if I unsub, Bill.  I'm not even
sure I will.  Maybe, maybe not.  I have more important things to focus
on.  But I'm not going to go to contortions for something which I've used
steadily less and less over the last three years.  But seriously, using
this in Mutt if you have a real name for the mailing list alias is a bitch.
Everything says "filePro Mailing List" in the index and you don't even see
the modified From: header until you open the mail.  Patently useless at the
index level, as you don't know whose mail you're opening.  And people's
quoting habits (including my more modern lax ones) are not helping.  It's
just painful.  Not your doing, but a fact nonetheless.

Pity it's come to this.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.