(DMARC) Why mailing lists are only sort of special

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Murray asked a couple of interesting questions, which I will address separately in separate message threads.

To the question why are mailing lists special, they're somewhat special, but they're more interesting here as canaries in the coal mine.

As a rough estimate, roughly 90% of e-mail is spam, most of what's left is bulk broadcast mail, most of what's left after that is transactional sort-of-broadcast mail, and the little bit at the end is discussion lists, individual mail, and some miscellaneous other stuff. Nonetheless, people have consistently said that they want to get their individual mail, and don't care about the broadcast mail. I'm not aware of surveys where they ask specifically about discussion lists, but since each message is generally hand written by an identifiable person, I'd expect people to consider it a lot closer to individual mail than the daily blast from BigCo.

So mailing list mail is special for the same reason individual mail is special--it's the mail people want.

The reason it's not special is that it's just the most visible example of a wide variety of legitimate useful mail that DMARC can't describe, and that are broken by DMARC policies other than p=none.

For example, I send and receive my Yahoo mail on my Gmail account, and have done so for years. Gmail makes the obvious checks to ensure that it's my account, so it's just as secure as sending from Yahoo, and it's useful. Or it was useful until last weekend. Now a lot of it bounces.

Or there's the WSJ's mail an article feature. It's useful, nobody abuses it. Yahoo users can't use it any more.

There's lots of these, and the only thing "wrong" with them is that DMARC can't distinguish them from other somewhat similar mail sources that send spam. The proposals I'm seeing from the DMARC cartel are basically Google Purge applied to e-mail:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/google-announces-plan-to-destroy-all-information-i,1783/

Surely we can do better than that, but that's the next message.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxxx, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.





[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]