[Mailman-Developers] Author_is_list option in upcoming mailman 2.1.16

[Mark Sapiro]

On 09/13/2013 08:06 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> 
> I will leave it to Mark for final decision on this, but my own opinion is that
> the mm_cfg.py option should stay.  cPanel already customizes their Mailman
> installation, so I think they should set it to Yes when they upgrade their
> systems to 2.1.16.


I don't feel strongly about this either way except for the general
principle of least surprise. Enabling this by default has three
downsides that I see. It can render a fully i18n translated General
Options page a bit ugly with one relatively large English paragraph; it
gives list owners yet another bullet with which to shoot themselves in
the foot, and it complicates list configuration by adding yet another
decision.

None of these is a deal breaker. I researched the i18n issue, and it
turns out only 4 languages currently have a fully translated General
Options page. One of these has already been updated and the other 3 are
being addressed. Most languages already have between 1 and 3
untranslated strings on this page from prior changes so it could be
argued that one more is not important.

The other two considerations are relatively minor, but I still lean
towards requiring overt action by the site admin to enable the feature.

I wanted this brought to mailman-developers in the hope that whatever
discussion ensued would lead to some consensus.

I confess, I'm not at all up to speed on DMARC. Franck has assured me
that this feature can be useful even in the absence of the DNS and MTA
changes necessary to DKIM sign outgoing list mail, but it seems to me
that enabling author_is_list will almost guarantee that any incoming
DKIM signatures will be broken (the From: is almost certainly included
in the signed headers) which will cause problems if the outgoing mail is
not signed with a valid DKIM signature.

Also, it seems that an installation would want to validate in some way
incoming mail before taking responsibility, even in a minor way, for
resending it.

All of this leads me to think that making this available to list owners
should be an installation decision rather than being done by default.

Please help me understand if I'm wrong.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan