Re: New email address - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 11/24/2015 07:55 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> I wrote:
>> "Rudolph T. Maceyko" <rm55@pobox.com> writes:
>>> The basic changes since Yahoo implemented their p=reject DMARC policy
>>> last year (and others followed) were:
>>> * make NO CHANGES to the body of the message--no headers, footers, etc. 
>>> * make NO CHANGES to the subject header of the message--no more
>>> "[Highland Park]" 
>>> * when mail comes to the list from a domain that uses a p=reject DMARC
>>> policy, CHANGE THE FROM HEADER so that it comes from the list.
> 
> After further off-list discussion with Rudy, I'm not entirely convinced
> by his reasoning for dropping Subject-munging and footer-addition; it
> seems like that might be at least in part a limitation of his
> mailman-based infrastructure.
> 
> The clearly critical thing, though, is that when forwarding a message from
> a person at a DMARC-using domain, we would have to replace the From: line
> with something @postgresql.org.  This is what gets it out from under the
> original domain's DMARC policy.

exactly

> 
> The other stuff Rudy did, including adding the list's own DKIM-Signatures
> and publishing DMARC and SPF policy for the list domain, is not
> technically necessary (yet) but it makes the list traffic less likely to
> get tagged as spam by antispam heuristics.  And, as he noted, there are
> feedback loops that mean once some traffic gets tagged as spam it becomes
> more likely that future traffic will be.

well the purpose of the feedback loops is for the receiving ISP to feed
back information about (mostly) user tagged "I dont want this email"
(which is what the work on - not actual heuristics triggering) stuff -
from historical experience that works very very poor for a mailing list
like ours because in almost all cases subscribers are simply using the
"this is spam" feature to declare an email as "unwanted" and using it as
a shortcut to actually unsubscribing (and not thinking about any further
impact).


> 
> If Rudy's right that Gmail is likely to start using p=reject DMARC policy,
> we are going to have to do something about this before that; we have too
> many people on gmail.  I'm not exactly in love with replacing From:
> headers but there may be little alternative.  We could do something like
>     From: Persons Real Name <nobody@postgresql.org>
>     Reply-To: ...
> so that at least the person's name would still be readable in MUA
> displays.
> 
> We'd have to figure out whether we want the Reply-To: to be the original
> author or the list; as I recall, neither of those are fully satisfactory.

well this is basically what it boils down to - we will absolutely have
to do is replacing "From:" (assuming the gmail rumour is true which I'm
not entirely convinced though) but what are we prepared to replace the
current system with and are we accepting that the lists are going to
work differently.


Stefan