A possible looming problem with DMARC
In the last week or two Yahoo groups has turned on something called DMARC -
see for example:
http://yahoomail.tumblr.com/post/82426900353/yahoo-dmarc-policy-change-what-should-senders-do
http://blog.returnpath.com/blog/christine-borgia/all-about-yahoos-dmarc-reject-policy
Basically it's a system for rejecting emails not sent from a server
associated with the domain name in that email's FROM address. For now this
is causing mayhem on mail lists (where mails being distributed to
subscribers are sent by the mail-list's server but contain in their FROM
headers the name of the original author of each post, specifying a domain
not the same as the mail list server's domain).
Yahoo's suggesting mail lists can get around the issues by changing content
of FROM and other headers, in direct contravention of the RFCs that dictate
how mail lists should work.
A small problem (even if you're not actually using a Yahoo.com email
address) is that mails sent out by Yahoo groups mail lists no longer have
the original author of a message specified in the FROM address; the FROM
header now contains eg
From: "Original author <authorsemailaddress> listname" <listaddress>
This means that an incautious attempt to reply to a specific single
individual will send that reply to the whole list, because it's the whole
list's email address that's outside the quoted part of the header value.
While the Yahoo-specific issue is not affecting me much, I see a knock-on
problem if other systems receiving emails start comparing the sending server
name with the domain named in FROM addresses. At the moment I send all my
outbound emails through a single SMTP server, but these mails have a variety
of domains named in their FROM addresses.
It looks as if in future I may need to send sets of emails out via different
SMTP servers. This will be
a) nigh on impossible unless MP has a way for me to associate a
specific account with each of my named identities
b) prevent forever any of us using differing SMTP servers as fallback
in case our main / chosen server is not available
--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
______________________________________________________________________
This message was sent via the gemini-users mailing list
To unsubscribe, mail gemini-users+unsubscribe@...
|