[Sca-cooks] List Test

[Joel Lord]

Yahoo! and AOL have gone out of their way to break mailing lists.

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg87153.html

Yahoo! went first, AOL joined a few weeks later.

Since that article is _very_ dry, let me translate.  DMARC is a 
mechanism for domains (yahoo.com, for example) to try and combat 
spoofing of their address.  There are 3 "severity" settings: p=none, 
p=quarantine, and p=reject.  Prior to early April, no one had used 
anything above p=none.

DMARC puts a signature into each email where you only see it if you know 
where to look.  It's attached to the domain that sent the message, along 
with a bunch of other bits and pieces like the Subject:.  Mailing lists 
change the Subject:, so the signature is invalid... but the From: still 
says yahoo.com, so it's yahoo.com's DMARC rules that apply.

EVERYONE who has even a p=none rule out there (which means they get 
information and don't destroy email) will honor someone else's rule. 
That is, att.net has a p=none so email spoofed to appear to be from 
att.net will cause att.net to get notified.  But att.net will honor 
yahoo.com's p=reject, so when att.net receives email that appears to be 
spoofed from yahoo.com, they actually reject it.  This part is what bits 
most mailing list users on the butt, since only 5% of people are still 
on AOL, and something like 7% are still on Yahoo... but more like 75% of 
people are using services that will honor this.

The fix?  ansteorra.org _desperately_ needs to upgrade their version of 
mailman to newest (it only came out a few days ago) and turn on the 
DMARC header munging features.  Also, they need to add 
lists.ansteorra.org to the SPF record, since that's probably what's 
causing messages to get dumped to GMail's spam folder.

I host 200+ mailing lists for 20+ not-for-profit organizations.  I've 
been chewing on this since the beginning of April.  Hopefully someone 
here will know who to forward this along to, since that one paragraph 
with the fix is easy to do, but you only do it when you realize it is 
needed.

On 5/8/2014 10:25 AM, Doug Bell wrote:
> I am getting disable notices and missing my own posts along with not recieving other random posts. This is occurring with all of the lists on the Ansteorran server. Until they get their act together I am unsubscribing from all of their lists.
>
>
> Magnus
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>   From: Terry Decker <t.d.decker at att.net>
> To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2014 8:08 AM
> Subject: [Sca-cooks] List Test
>
>
> I've received a disable notice for bounces for an email address that was
> changed years ago.  I went to the mailing list page at ansteorra.org and
> found it disabled.  The list page can still be reached at
> http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org.  The last
> archived message is from May 1.  So apparently we have problems at the
> server.  I'm putting this out to see if it comes back to me.
>
> Bear
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sca-cooks mailing list
> Sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
> http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org
> _______________________________________________
> Sca-cooks mailing list
> Sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
> http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org
>


-- 
Joel Lord
Web Administrator, Alpha Psi Omega Grand Cast
etc... etc... etc...