Franck Martin writes: > If the From: contains the posting email of the mailing list, one > would think that the default becomes reply to the list, but this is > where Reply-To: can be used.
Most users do not display Reply-To; many cannot (at least not at their level of technical skill). This means that they get no indication of the author of a message unless the author signs the body of the mail, which often isn't done, and is impossible to enforce. So this setting is simply unacceptable except on announce/advertising lists (where Reply-To is usually set to some other address anyway) and on anonymous lists (which as far as I know are relatively rare). If this option becomes a popular filter on large mail hosts, discussion lists (ie, the kind of mailing list that Mailman was originally intended to serve) will take a severe, perhaps fatal, blow. > I hope this helps alleviate concerns. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Imposition of authentication designed for personal and other direct mail on aggregate-and-forward services like Mailman is a knife at our throat in principle. Despite obvious goodwill on the part of IETF and others involved in the discussions, I have seen no proposal that works well for discussion lists as currently constituted. And, even more unfortunate, there is ample evidence that the large freemail services (including AOL), not to mention many inexpensive hosting services, consider the possibility that even one spam gets through a knife at *their* throats, while non-delivery of legitimate mail is no problem because it can always be blamed on somebody else.[1] I fear that any halfway plausible plan (even one as flawed as Gmail's handling of "own posts") could get quick and widespread adoption if Mailman offers such features, and operators of discussion lists will be blamed for their poor attitude toward spam-fighting when they resist using them. One might also speculate that the big portal operators are strategicly hostile to independently operated mailing lists, as they would like people to use their forum services instead. But that's purely speculation. None of this is your fault or Murray's, or DMARC's or DKIM's (despite its yahoo roots). It is, however, a reality that *we* face. > PS: Stephen, Murray does not work for Google, and therefore cannot > change the way gmail works. I'm aware of that. I was ribbing him for his choice of mailbox at Gamil. He obviously thinks it's funny; nobody imposed it on him! Footnotes: [1] For example, my University's Information and Media Center (which intercepts all SMTP connections, and likes to think of itself as in the same class as the MIT Media Lab) labelled Murray's mail "[Suspected Spam]" in the Subject field (which I removed in the interest of remaining friends). I can't even rely on the "[Spam]" label when applied by their incompetent filters. :-( _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
