Re: ugly hacks (was: Re: We are not a mail forwarding service)

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Keith Moore  <[e-mail]> said:
>> Beyond that, we already have the revsrsible address rewriting hack I 
>> invented for the mailing lists which turns [e-mail] into 
>> steve=[e-mail].  It's ugly but it works and it is 
>> simple enough that you can undo it in procmail as you deliver your own 
>> mail.
>
>Every deployed hack (including NAT) is ugly but "works" in isolation, 
>provided you only consider the use cases you care about.   It's when 
>multiple hacks (each with limited applicability) are layered that the 
>problems crop up.   And yet, quite often the proposed solutions are to 
>add more ugly hacks that are themselves of limited applicability.

I've been using this hack on my own mailing lists since 2015.
If it were breaking other things, we'd probably know by now.

As I said a couple of messages back, I am not thrilled about the way
large (and some small) mail systems are using DMARC on mail for which
it was not intended, but it's not going away and this is the least bad
way we know to route around this particular damage.

R's,
John