Re: DMARC: perspectives from a listadmin of large open-source lists

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Dave Crocker wrote:
On 4/14/2014 3:27 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
What I AM suggesting however, and I realize that this is a hard pill to
swallow for many IETF'ers, is that IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS mailing
list traffic is inconsequential to large e-mail providers.


That view is popular, but it's quite wrong.

What /is/ true is that mailing list traffic by users of large mailbox providers, through small, independent mailing list providers, is probably negligible. That's the category of primary victim of the recent change.

I'm not sure that's true, Dave.

The lists I run, these days, are for things like community organizations, parent-teacher groups, churches, and such. What I find is that over half of my subscribers - both in the high-income city where I live, and Boston Public Schools (where I used to live) - are coming in through yahoo and hotmail accounts, followed by a mix of ISP accounts with broadband providers (Comcast, RCN, Verizon in these climes).

Now an awful lot of these folks ALSO have work email, and a lot of some other personal email address - so my guess is that: - folks who don't do a lot of email, sign up for a yahoo or hotmail account because it's free and easy - more sophisticated folks, sign up for a free account to segregate truly personal, and work related email from lists, and commercial sites

This also doesn't seem to be limited to more settled folks - all three of my college/just-post-college kids have either a hotmail, yahoo, or gmail account (1 each) - again, probably because it's free. They use accounts on one of my servers for more official things like job applications.

Now, given that pretty much every parent with a kid in the local schools is on a parent-teacher email list; and everyone in the two churches I support is on their respective email lists; and there are very active neighborhood level parent and community lists - there are an awful lot of email list users around here. I expect the same is true elsewhere (how many people reading this are on a school or church related list, not to mention various technical lists?). And I note that those lists are all quite active.

Now, the list activity is still dwarfed by spam - but once you filter out the spam, and general commercial crap, I expect what's left in most people's email is a mix of directly personal, work, email lists, and notifications from social network sites.

I could be wrong on this - but I have a pretty good window into email use in this corner of the world, and that's what I see.

Cheers,

Miles

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra





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