RE: DMARC: perspectives from a listadmin of large open-source lists

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi Mike,
At 09:53 14-04-2014, MH Michael Hammer (5304) wrote:
>The fact is that a vocal constituency led by John Levine made it 
>extremely clear that MLMs were out of scope and there was zero 
>interest on the part of the MLM community in discussing ways in 
>which MLMs could be made to work in an email authentication 
>framework even if there were any MLM operators willing to do so. His 
>stated solution has been and continues to be that list operators 
>should drop any participants who post from a domain publishing 
>p=reject and to prevent any new participants from joining from a 
>domain that publishes p=reject. The record is quite clear on this 
>and is available to anyone who wishes to peruse email archives, blog 
>posts, etc. I view this as local policy and up to the list operator. 
>I'm not confident how well this will ultimately work for many 
>organizations the operators manage lists for. Just to be clear, the 
>preceding is more of a question than an assertion.

I don't think that there is zero interest from the Mailman community 
(that's my interpretation of the Mailman discussions).  Mailman 
developers do not participate in the IETF.  There is an employee of a 
well-known company who has been arguing for changes to the mailing 
list management software since a long time.  The Mailman patch for 
DMARC was written by Jim Popovitch and Phil Pennock ( 
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2013-October/023349.html 
and 
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2013-November/023384.html 
).

Mailing list traffic is not significant in comparison with overall 
mail traffic.  At the risk of sounding insensitive there isn't a 
business case for some providers to support mailing list traffic.  I 
would consider John Levine's point about making it out of 
scope.  There's still the problem of what to do about mailing lists.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy