>That's true. I'm having some trouble with the notion that MLMs need to be >immune from change because they somehow have that status.
In case it's not obvious, this is actually an argument about money. Mailing lists are an odd but important mail niche. The total volume is small, but the value to the users is closer to that individuals' mail than to the stuff that ESPs send. I would go so far as to say that mailing lists provide part of the value that brings users to free mail providers. There are other bits of the mail ecosystem with similar DMARC issues and arguably similar value, e.g., the WSJ's mail an article, which I can assure you we WSJ online subscribers use all the time. The problems with DMARC and mailing lists were apparent from the start, but has never been addressed seriously. Until this week, the parties that benefit from DMARC have borne the costs. Nobody with users who send a lot of mail to mailing lists published DMARC records that pushed new costs onto mailing list operators. I understand that Yahoo has awful abuse problems, although I would guess that Google's are in the same ballpark. But Yahoo is a business, not a charity, and its problems are its problems to solve, not to demand that the rest of the world solve. If it's "too expensive" for a provider to manage their abuse problems, they're in the wrong business. Given that we all know that strong DMARC policies will screw up innocent third parties, the DMARC crowd could have planned ahead to mitigate the damage. They could, for example, have built whitelists of sources of legitimate mail that DMARC doesn't handle, or more likely paid someone like Return Path to do it. If the various mail receivers knew who to whitelist, it would be fine for Yahoo or anyone else to crank up the policy knob, since the people cranking up the knob would have anticipated and dealt with the problem. Instead, I'm hearing that it's my job to change my software by removing useful features, so that Yahoo's users can continue to use services that make their Yahoo accounts valuable to them. To put it mildly, don't be ridiculous. It's their problem, they better deal with the damage. R's, John _______________________________________________ dmarc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://www.dmarc.org/mailman/listinfo/dmarc-discuss NOTE: Participating in this list means you agree to the DMARC Note Well terms (http://www.dmarc.org/note_well.html)
