Re: DMARC and yahoo

[Theodore Ts'o <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 12:04:00PM -0600, Doug Royer wrote:
> 
> If yahoo sends out an email from list-name@yahoo, then that is where the
> email is from.
> 
> So it would be correct to set the from/sender in the email to be
> [e-mail].
> Why try to make it fake anything?
> 
> If you want to preserve any digital signature in the original message, then
> send the original email as a mime body part in the forwarded message.

Because this message that you just sent was sent _from_ Doug Royer, in
the sense that it was authored by Doug Royer.  It was not authored by
"[e-mail]", and that's in fact what most users would find more
interesting, since they have other ways of determining that a
particular message was sent via a particular mailing list reflector.

Fundamentally, this is going to be main issue.  For mailing list
users, when they are following a particular conversation, they want to
be able to easily identify which e-mails were contributed by which
participant.  This has historically been done via the "From" field.
It's possible to reinvent some other field, to indicate who had
originally authored the message --- say, adding a
"X-Originally-Authored-By".  But the fundamental issue is that it's
useful and interesting and wanted that people be able to get the
"originally authored by" message.  And so eventually, MUA are going to
be responsive to users' needs.

The fact that spammers could then use this confuse naive users is not
likely going to stop them, because if you are having a multi-user
conversation via e-mail, to make all of them appear to come from
"[e-mail]" is just not acceptable to the users of that
mailing list.  They will want to know who originally authored the each
e-mail message.

	   	       	    	  - Ted