On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 07:01:29PM -0500, John R Levine wrote: > > Ted, you are ascribing more concern about this by the providers than I'm > > seeing. > > Having talked to many of the same people at large mail providers that Dave > has, and also done some policy work for more than one of them* I have to > agree. Google has on the order of a billion mail users, and the other large > providers have hundreds of millions. The idea that they would weigh those > users against at most a few thousand people doing Linux or the IETF just > isn't plausible. And yet, vger.kernel.org is not rewriting its From field, and we have hard numbers that the number of developers for the Linux Kernel are not decreasing... Maybe it's because certain mail providers are not actually honoring the the DMARC spec by not rejecting mailing list mail from p=reject domains unconditionally, maybe it's because peoeple have switch mail domains in order to successfully participate at vger.kernel.org, or maybe it's a little of both. Or maybe it's because most companies aren't using DMARC, and any of the developers are either coming from company addresses, as opposed to using a lot of big consumer mail providers (which might very well be the case for the IETF as well). Speaking of company addresses, one interesting case study which shows the economic power of Linux was that it actually caused IBM to except Linux Technology Center members from having to Lotus Notes (which given the power of IBM Software Group at the time, was in my opinion a far bigger sign of power than IBM deciding to invest a billion dollars in Linux). If you wanted to interact with the rest of the Linux Community, you weren't going to be using Lotus Notes. And guess what; an alternative was provided. It had nothing to do with Linux being a cult. It had to do with a very simple business decision. I really do believe the IETF is underestimating how much power it has; even if it can't move the big consumer mail providers, developers who want to interact with the IETF will find a way.... and if not, maybe the IETF doesn't have the power to be an effective standards organization any more. (Which certainly seems to be true in the e-mail space, anyway....) - Ted