I hate the new mail system

Eric Smith spacewar at gmail.com
Tue Mar 7 04:21:12 CST 2017


On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 2:48 AM, Christian Corti via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> And cctalk at ... is neither responsible for the writing of the message nor
> does it belong to the author of the message. But replies should be directed
> there, so there should be a Reply-To: field containing cctalk at ... and the
> From: field should contain the author's address.
>

And thus we come full circle. The "From:" header containing the original
author's address is the cause of the unsubscribes due to bounces, and (I
assume) the motivation for the recent change to the list behavior.

The problem is that major production MTAs will reject (bounce) email with a
"From:" whose domain uses DKIM or SPF, when the sending MTA isn't in the
DKIM or SPF authorized sender list. This will almost always be true when
messages are forwarded by a mailing list. Since the bounces go back to the
mailing list, the mailing list software then drops the entirely legitimate
list subscriber's subscription.  :-(

The behavior you describe is certainly correct according to the RFCs, but
unfortunately now falls apart in practice.  :-(


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