2 Jul
2016
2 Jul
'16
9:15 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jay West
Sent: 02 July 2016 10:37
To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: RE: Excessive Bounces
I did dig into this for Rob, as well as a smattering of others that got
disabled
yesterday early am.
Almost 100% of the email addresses that get disabled due to excessive
retries are Hotmail, aol, and yahoo. Those email providers are well known
as
"less than reliable" to many servers, often
because they are major sources
of
spam.
Of those bounces, almost 100% of them were due to DMARC/DKIM
mechanisms. I view DMARC/DKIM as less than useless. First, they are far
from universally implemented - so most valid email is not DMARC/DKIM
"protected". Second a large percentage of the spam in the world *IS*
DMARC/DKIM "protected".
What is odd to me, many of the email addresses (list members) that get
dropped due to excessive retries are listmembers who *DO* get list traffic
for a while before getting occasionally disabled. I would bet that what is
happening most of the time is that their ISP maintains a flock of MX hosts
and
at one time decided to implement DKIM/DMARC but then
realized it's a bad
idea and removed it from service but forgot to do that on one or two of
the
flock. Thus... by happenstance once in a while your
email hits that
particular
mx host and gets toasted. The reverse is certainly
possible - that they
are
"beta testing" it on a few of their MX hosts
but not wanting to do it
everywhere.
Please, let's not go into a long thread of the merits of SPF/DKIM/DMARC...
I'm just letting folks know what is probably responsible for most of the
"subscription disabled..." stuff.
I have no competence to judge the merits or otherwise of these mechanisms,
so I won't say anything about it. What I would say though is, if this
affects a fair number of people, could the list server be configured to be a
bit more tolerant of bounces?
Regards
Rob