Re: gnu.org mailing lists and DMARC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Reuben Thomas <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2017 10:06:50 +0100
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> For a couple of years now, the domain from which I'm writing
> (sc3d.org) has had a strict DMARC configuration, with p=reject. This
> interacts badly with mailing lists that rewrite messages sent out with
> the From address of the original author: such message should be
> bounced by recipients' systems, which can cause mailman to
> automatically unsubscribe them. Eli noticed this in one case where an
> active contributor was unsubscribed from a list.

Hi,

This issue just cost me today an hour of my non-existent free time: a
message sent by Reuben caused massive bounces, and as result about 500
members of the emacs-devel list had their subscriptions disabled!  I
needed to manually re-enable them one by one.

Can something please be done about this?  PLEASE??

> Some major email providers have set DMARC p=reject for all their
> users, including Yahoo! and AOL. Others have announced plans to do so,
> such as Google and Microsoft. (Google already uses p=quarantine for
> googlemail.com, which mean that emails to gnu.org lists coming from
> @googlemail.com will be marked as spam by most recipients.)
> 
> There are two main ways to deal with this problem:
> 
> 1. Forbid email addresses that use DMARC p={quarantine,reject} from
> subscribing to gnu.org lists. Users would be forced to resubscribe
> with a different address; in practise, some won't know how to do that
> conveniently, and others wouldn't bother. Also, it will get harder to
> obtain such an alternative address: gmail.com currently sets p=none,
> but Google has announced its intention to change that. (Also, a
> gnu.org list can hardly recommend "get a GMail address": we'd have to
> find a suitable service to recommend to our users; I have no idea
> whether one even exists.)
> 
> 2. Reconfigure mailman to work with DMARC. This is what the Debian
> project did in 2015 by reconfiguring mailman for their lists to not
> rewrite the Subject or modify the message body (in particular this
> means not adding a message footer). The relevant bug (with a long
> discussion) is here:
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=752084
> 
> Options for dealing with DMARC in mailman are documented here:
> 
> https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DMARC
> 
> I hope you're able to find a good solution for GNU mailing lists: if
> it's not possible to reconfigure mailman globally, then list
> administrators should at least be warned of the problem and offered
> solutions; obviously, if different gnu.org lists end up working
> differently, that will create other problems.
> 
> -- 
> https://rrt.sc3d.org
>