[conspire] (forw) Drastic step to deal with DMARC damage (was: What the hey? I am still garrison.hilliard at gmail.com)

[Local mailing list for the CABAL Linux user group.]

> >    Hide the sender of a message, replacing it with the list address
> >    (Removes From, Sender and Reply-To fields)
> > 
> >    That setting is called "anonymous list", for short.
> 
> This is a very bad idea and you can already acknowledge the effects and I
> bet it's not necessary but I understand I've no right to assume you've to
> fix it.

(this is Akkana)
The small mailing list I mentioned a few weeks ago (the one that's currently running on smartlist on our modest server) used to be on mailman 2 (on a server run by a hosting service which is no longer around), several years ago. It had so much trouble with bounces and messages silently being dropped that my husband, who administers the list, eventually ended up with the list being anonymous.

It was horrible. No matter how many times you tell people to say who they are (since the From line doesn't do that any more), some of them will forget, and lots of users don't add a signature, so you read through threads having no idea who said what.

I'm also on quite a few mailing lists running under mailman 2 that use an in-between setting that changes the address but not the fullname:
    From: June Blow via Listname <listaddress at mailman.example.com>
and that seems to be enough (so far) to keep Gmail etc. happy while still preserving information on who wrote what.

Our current smartlist setup sends out messages with the From showing the actual sender, both their real name and their email. I don't understand how it manages that without all the bounces and drops that mailman had. (Of course it's also running on a different host, so lots of things are different.)

Rick, if you get some free time between elections to experiment with different setups and want to see headers or smartlist config or anything, drop me a note off-list.

Of course testing any of this is made a lot more difficult by Google's maddening inconsistency. In LWVNM we have some email aliases maintained by our hosting provider. Over the past few years they've gone from bouncing maybe one time out of ten, to one time out of five, to, with Google's latest change, maybe three times out of four. I assume this is because there are a zillion gmail servers and they don't all have the same config settings, but it makes things a lot harder to test. Did it bounce? No. Does that mean this setting fixes the problem? No! How many test messages do I have to send? Who knows?

        ...Akkana

        ...Akkana