[Mailman-Users] DMARC and Reply-To lines with from_is_list munging.

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Sat, 2014-05-10 at 04:01 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Lindsay Haisley writes:
> 
>  > What goes into an address comment is, or should be, purely
>  > informational on a human level, and ignored on a computational
>  > level.
> 
> Unfortunately, we can't depend on that:

The operational term is "or should be" :/

> DMARC draft, sec. 15.2.  This is discussion of matters outside the
> scope of DMARC itself, not a normative specification, and the document
> itself says there are legitimate uses of email addresses in display
> names (or comments).  But that hasn't stopped the spam-fighters in the
> past; it may not stop them this time.  AFAICS, putting an address from
> a DMARC domain anywhere in the mail leaves you subject to a possible
> DMARC reject unless you satisfy "from alignment" for that domain
> exactly as specified in DMARC.
> 
> That's not implemented by anyone now, and may never be.  And
> obfuscating the address as in the OP may help, but for my previous
> work address that would be
> 
>     stephen dot turnbull dot 1 at econ dot ohio-state dot edu
> 
> which is 57 characters.  You pays your money and you takes your
> choice, I guess.

DMARC is ugly, as AOL and Yahoo are using it.  From: header munging is
ugly.  Ugly begets ugly when agreements start to break down.  All we can
do is ride with it and hope that smart people with cool heads and a
sense of the real value of a smoothly working Internet to the larger
community will ultimately prevail.  I'm not overly optimistic at this
point.  AFAICS, this just another aspect of the general abandonment of
net neutrality, one which has come in under the radar of the nightly
news.

A nice fix, albeit probably total pie-in-the-sky, would be the
establishment of a MIME Content-Type: multipart/list-post, a variation
on (or extension of) mulpart/mixed.  MUAs SHOULD (in the RFC 2119 sense)
effectively hide the outermost enclosing MIME envelope with this
Content-Type and present the contents according to rules that would
apply were the enclosing MIME envelope not there.  As far as the mail
system is concerned, the headers on the envelope are the effective ones.
As far as the MUA is concerned, for presentation purposes, the envelope
content is what counts.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Everything works if you let it"
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