Re: IETF Mailing Lists and DMARC

[Ted Lemon <mellon@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 3, 2016, at 11:48 AM, Bob Hinden <bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

While I agree that it has been broken for a long time and would be good to fix, I note that understanding the problem does not mean there is a workable solution.  From reading this thread, it sounds to me that if there was a workable solution, it would have been fixed by now.  The potential solutions being proposed, appear to have side effect worse than than the original problem.

There are definitely workable solutions which appear to be attractive to a lot of IETF participants.   However, none of these solutions are perfect, and therein lies the rub.   There is no clean solution to this problem, and won’t be until ARC is done.   I want the clean solution too; I just think that in the absence of that solution, the best tradeoff is not to continue with the current brokenness.   It is certainly true that breaking certain expectations in the standard is bad; however, silent non-delivery of email and unsubscription of participants from mailing lists is far worse.

We should either ensure that the non-delivery is explicit, so that people can take action to correct the problem on their end, or else we should ensure that delivery happens correctly, despite unfortunate breakage to rfc822 headers.   I too am happy the IESG is looking at this. :)