[Mailman-Users] Mailman's solution to DMARC makes List-Id useless

Richard legalize at xmission.com
Thu Aug 20 19:13:45 CEST 2015


Hi,

I'm on a mailing list that recently switched the mailman DMARC setting
to "Munge from".  IMO, the munging of the From: line is fine as far as
I'm concerned and I see how that fixes the DMARC problem.

However, what is really annoying is that it takes the original From:
line and puts it on the Reply-To: line and there's no way to turn this
off.

I can't seem to find any explanation of why anyone thinks this is a
good idea.  Maybe someone here can explain it to me.

Below is why I think it's a bad idea.  Why can't we encode the original
email address in a comment or quoted token on the From: line instead of
jamming it onto Reply-To?

This is how I'm seeing mailing list messages now:

      To: Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov>
      cc: cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org,
          Commit Messages and Patches for LLVM <llvm-commits at lists.llvm.org>
    From: Lang Hames via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Reply-To: Lang Hames <lhames at gmail.com>

The reply-to is going to the sender instead of the list, which is
making people cc the mailing list in order to get things to go back to
the list.  From what I read of DMARC, it's the munging of the From:
line that is needed in order to have messages pass the DMARC checks.
To me this makes sense -- the mailing list domain is sending the message
to the list and the appropriate domain checks need to be made against
the mailing list's domain, not the original author of the mailing list
message.

What I'm not understanding is how DMARC is mandating that Reply-To: go
back to the original author, and not the mailing list, as is the
usualy convention: public conversations from a mailing list cycle back
to the mailing list by default and only fork into a private
conversation when specifically requested.

What's happening now is that people are doing "reply to all" in order
to get the mailing list included, which makes *me* the recipient of
their reply and the mailing list cc'ed.  Then the mailing list
software notices that the message was sent *to* an address already on
the mailing list, so it doesn't send me a second copy of the message.

This means that every time someone replies to my messages on the
mailing list, and all subsequent replies in the thread because
everyone else will do reply-to-all as well, I'll be getting all these
private messages that are actually copies of the public messages but
I won't be getting the public messages.

This makes the entire List-Id field useless because none of these
replies to threads in which I participate will come back to me through
the mailing list, but instead as private copies of public messages
sent to the mailing list.  As a result, it basically screws up all
mailing list filtering -- which was the whole point of the list-id
field.
-- 
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