On 04/17/2014 07:41 AM, ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I also find it particularly revealing that one of the arguments being made here is along of the lines of, "Everything else has had to change, why are those stodgy old mailing list thingies somehow exempt?" Except that's not it at all - the approach was always essentially, "We're going to screw you, how about you do X or Y to mitigate the damage a little?" To which the answer, predictably, was less than enthusiastic.
Another way to look at this is that the IETF, which ostensibly is interested in "input from operators," received pretty clear "input" from the operators of the largest mail systems on the planet, and collectively stuck their fingers in their ears and sang "la la la la la, I can't hear you" because it didn't like what was being said.
The message was pretty clearly, "We think DMARC is valuable enough to us that we plan to deploy it even though it has the unfortunate side effect of causing problems for mailing lists." Rather than throwing up our hands and telling the DMARC folks that we refuse to work with them unless their solution solves the problem of our anachronistic use case that that constitutes only a tiny percentage of their overall traffic; a more rational approach would have been to recognize that the tail is not going to wag the dog here and start working with mailing list authors to solve the problem of how to live in a world that includes DMARC.
When people talk about how the IETF is out of touch with the operator community and increasingly irrelevant, this is exactly the kind of thing that they are talking about. We ignore this lesson at our peril.
Doug