[dmarc-ietf] are mailing lists worth saving?

[Michael Thomas <[e-mail]>]

I know it's heresy on an ietf list to suggest it, but we know that 
amount of traffic going through mailing lists is tiny -- like a couple 
percent. The amount of traffic going through other forms of manglers has 
to be even farther down in the long tail of traffic. Mailing lists arose 
because that's pretty much the only way you could get one to many 
communication (ignoring usenet). But with the rise of the web that 
ceased being true, and a lot of that traffic is now just web-based 
forums, etc.

The benefit for DMARC, of course, is that we could just pick the few 
nits left in the spec and call it a day knowing that p=reject is 
perfectly fine in a mailing-list-as-historic world. IETF has always been 
pretty retrograde and conservative -- I mean, a thousand long thread of 
hand wringing about FTP fergawdsake on the ietf list shows that. But 
mailing lists are seriously ancient technology and maybe they like FTP 
have outlived their usefulness for all of the trouble they cause.

Would it even take all that much effort? Mailing lists could easily be 
gatewayed to something that sinks the messages and provides a UI to 
read  them if your home domain is set up as p=reject. For all I know, 
such services already exist. Something with its own UI could even create 
the UI such that it even preserves the DKIM signature! No need to modify 
things in-band.

Basically just declare that mailing lists do not meet the security 
requirements of the modern internet and they are an intractable problem 
without a good solution... just like FTP.

Mike