[Dragaera] Interesting times for mailing lists!

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Interesting times for mailing lists! (Not just this one.)

This is a heads-up, to explain weirdnesses you may see and strange
temporary policy changes we may be forced make.

A technical change in how some big domains (AOL and Yahoo! recently)
handle email will have an impact on lists that have members posting
*from* AOL and Yahoo! addresses.

Note that the problem is NOT with AOL or Yahoo! members *receiving* list
email; the problem is weirder and much nastier than that. A post sent by
a Yahoo! user will be redistributed by the list in such a way that any
destination protected by DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication,
Reporting & Conformance) see: <http://dmarc.org/overview.html> will
bounce the message. Repeated instances of this will cause the
*recipient* (not the sender) to be unsubscribed from the list. There are
nearly 2 billion email accounts worldwide protected by DMARC; it's not rare.

If you only read the list and don’t post, there's nothing much useful
you can do (even members registered using AOL or Yahoo! email accounts),
except keep your eyes open for unsubscribe messages and resubscribe
yourself if you get unsubscribed. Annoying, but an easy fix.

Until we have this better figured out, though, we are asking that
members registered with AOL and Yahoo! accounts to *not post* using
those addresses. In fact, I've added filters to block posts from those
addresses. Sorry, it's nothing personal!

If you have another address that you can move your subscription to, that
might be a good idea. You can still read at your AOL or Yahoo address --
in fact you can set the other subscription to no-mail so you don't even
receive copies of the messages there, but it still recognizes that other
address for posting.

There's little we can do to improve things in the short run. In the
medium run there's a new version of Mailman (2.1.18rc3 I believe) that
will kind of kludge around this (by changing headers enough that it
won't look like forged email to DMARC any more). We can't control the
release cycle or Dreamhost implementation of it, though. (I'll certainly
poke Dreamhost about its importance to our list).

We currently have 9 aol.com addresses on the list and 32 yahoo.com
addresses.

A short-term desperation measure would be to set the entire list to
"anonymous" mode. All identifying information would be stripped from the
message headers, thus eliminating the problem -- but also making users’
signatures the only way to tell who posted any message. This has been
reported to eliminate the problem delivering messages from
DMARC-protected domains (with full "reject" mode configured) to
DMARC-protected domains. However, this step would not only greatly
complicate multi-reply threads, it will also mess up the by-user
archives. I will only resort to this if things somehow become really
desperate.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info Nikon DSLR photo list: http://d4scussion.com

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info     Nikon DSLR photo list: http://d4scussion.com