[conspire] (forw) [BALUG-Admin] So, DMARC. A week ago.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Steve Litt (slitt at troubleshooters.com):

> Rick Moen said on Wed, 7 Feb 2024 21:15:32 -0800
> 
> Why does the Original Poster (OP) use gmail in the first place? 

Boy are _you_ asking the wrong bloke.  ;->  (But of course, your
question is rhetorical.)

You know how most people are seduced by convenience, and Google makes 
"just use GMail" very attractive to the vast majority of people who 
would rather not pay for services.  And they've generally been 
(at least there's this advantage) markedly more competent at SMTP 
administration than the general run of "free" mail providers.

It's not for nothing that Yahoo Mail has been in decline, for example.

Sure, your speculation that Google would love to kill commodity,
IETF-standard e-mail is at least as plausible as most GOOG conspiracy
theories.

By the way, I'm delighted to see responses to my mailing list mail,
since getting arm-twisted into finally adding a (real) DMARC record:
I worry about both the spec and the implementations shooting my mail
deliverability, especially on mailing lists, in the foot -- so I'm 
reassured, just a little, to have gotten both an on-list response from
you and a couple of off-list ones from Elise Scher.  The more evidence
of the DMARC rollout not causing an instant debacle, the less worried 
I am.

This version of Mailman does not support DMARC "mitigations", by the
way, and that problem cannot be cured until I migrate off this 
system software build to something more modern.

At that time, I'll also have to contend with the "Mailman 2.7.x has long
been EOLed, and Mailman 3 is horrible" problem that faces all Mailman
2.7.x sites.

I _think_ Debian Project is still using SmartList (or at least
apparently were in 2018, going by remarks online).  I should try to find
a way to ask the Debian Project admins whether they still like and would
recommend it.

And what do the RHAT IBMers use, these days?  And Rocky Linux?

Long ago, I started a list of credible open-source competitors to
Mailman, and the list (of MLMs = mailing list managers) then was pretty
woefully thin (Sympa, ez-mlm/mlmmj).  (Please note that I'm not
including "newsletter e-mail marketing platform software, nor antiques
like ListProc.  Also, no, don't say Majordomo, LISTSERV, CREN ListProc,
Mailbase, Mercury MAISER, MX, or Smof, as all are both ancient and
proprietary.)

I'm not looking forward to having to slog through that (again) and
making a choice.  And then living with that choice and finding the bad
bits they didn't warn about.  Sympa is a "hell no" on grounds of baroque
overdesign (SOAP layer?  please!), Mailman 3 is reportedly still
regrettable, and ironically the djbware choice (such as mlmmj, the
modern reimplementation of ez-mlm's design) looks attractive on the
surface at least to the degree of "doesn't notoriously suck".

Any credible candidate has to at least have modern list-* headers
required by the last couple'a decades of RFCs, and some equivalent of
the DMARC mitigations you get in latter Mailman 2.7.x and all Mailman 3
releases.  And VERP.  Probably other criteria, too, many of them
necessitated by the spam war, but I can't think of those offhand, and
worry about discovering them the hard way, through their absence.

mlmmj does a very 1985 thing, I notice:  It says "Archiving, of course
we have that!"  But then "Oh, _Web-searchable_, HTML archiving?  Sure, I
guess you could get that by retrofitting third-party software like
mlmmj-webarchiver (based on MHonArc and perl) or Hypermail."

Yeah, thanks, guys.  I guess I'm spoiled by Mailman 2.7.x's idiotproof
and automagic archiving via Pipermail, and not happy any more with the
"Well, I guess you could build that, if you don't already have a hobby" 
approach that MLM admins faced before Mailman.

How good _is_ SmartList, anyway?  "Build on procmail?"  I dunno, man.