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

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> You know how most people are seduced by convenience, and Google makes 
> "just use GMail" very attractive to the vast majority of people who 

Also, for most non-techies these days, the idea of running a separate program for email (instead of just going to a page in their browser) probably sounds like a big complicated new thing they'd have to learn, thus to be avoided at all costs.

Of course there are other webmail providers, but if you have to use webmail, Google's UI is probably the best (part of what you said:

> (at least there's this advantage) markedly more competent at SMTP 
> administration than the general run of "free" mail providers.
)

Plus (the part I find most annoying), if you use gmail then nobody's going to complain that your mail is bouncing or dropping big attachments or something. Just happened to me yesterday ... sigh, do I have to go web searching to find out Gmail's new limit on message size and increase mine to match, yet again?

> 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:

Okay, here's my contribution. :-)

And I want to thank you for posting about it, because I didn't know there were new requirements, so it finally got me off my duff to add DMARC on my mail server. I had SPF already; adding DMARC was way easier than I expected. Your remark about DMARC requiring either SPF or DKIM, not both, was helpful, because most of the tutorials I found claimed both were required before adding the DMARC record.

> 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.

Our server hosts a couple of very small smartlist mailing lists, and it seems to be working well enough at least on a small scale. I don't administer these lists, my husband does, so I asked him. He says smartlist is fast and reliable, and much less hateful than mailman, but it doesn't have any documentation to speak of, so it takes a while to figure out how to do anything. But once you figure it out, you're set since "it hasn't changed in 20 years."

        ...Akkana