On 9/11/14 9:54 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Thursday, September 11, 2014 01:25 +0000 John Levine
<johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
The one that's most widely used rewrites the From: line to put
the list's address in place of the author's. It "works" in
the sense that it avoids DMARC rejections, but at the cost of
screwing up the mailing lists so you can't tell who wrote what
from the usual MUA display, and in many cases, you can't tell
who wrote a message at all unless you put the author's address
as the Reply-To, which has its own well known set of problems.
FWIW (and with the understanding that you don't need
convincing), I find that approach really objectionable. In
addition to the pragmatic reasons you cite (and some others such
as the ability to prioritize mail based on origin), we've been
careful, almost since the dawn of network mail, to associate
what now appears as "From:" with the actual originator of the
message. We've invented "Sender" and "Resent-" header fields to
preserve that distinction and make it clear. For a mail
exploder to violate that principle, especially to make an
ill-designed protocol work better, seems problematic to me.
For the IETF, it is bad news when we cannot or will not adopt.
use, and conform to one of our own established standards-track
protocols. But, if we have a system that does conform and we
switch it to not conform in order to accommodate an unfortunate
practice or design, that would be far worse, putting us in must
the same position we put ITU in when we pointed out that they
considered X.400 so stable, useful, and well-implemented that
they were using SMTP.
John Klensin,
If you don't like that solution, what solution do you propose to deal
with the large (by volume) installed base of DMARC domains relative to
mailing list traffic? It's fine and good to talk about theory, more
power to ya. :) But as Brian pointed out the volume of list traffic
that is being shunted to spam folders, or outright rejected, is only
increasing. Continuing to complain about DMARC, or the way it's being
used, is wasted electrons.
I proposed creating a draft for a standardized way of encoding the
original from address to the left of the @ sign so that the mailing list
sender could create a valid DKIM record, but clients could be taught to
decode the original From:. You and others pooh-pooh'ed that suggestion,
but I haven't seen a better one yet.
John Levine,
Perhaps you could share what you're doing with the secretariat? I agree
with John Klensin that it would be awesome for the IETF to become
thought leaders in creating a solution for mailing lists in the p=reject
era.
In any case, clearly "do nothing" is not the right answer here.
Doug