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Re: [ietf-smtp] Email explained from first principles

2021-05-27 11:23:32
On Thu, 27 May 2021, Kaspar Etter wrote:

This conversation went off on a tangent, but I also want to comment on a couple 
of things:

On 24 May 2021, at 16:03, John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:

It appears that Kaspar Etter  <kaspar(_at_)ef1p(_dot_)com> said:
2. List-Name header field: Mailing lists shouldn’t rewrite the messages of 
others and break DKIM signatures in the process.

Sorry, but this shows some serious misunderstandings about both DKIM and 
mailing lists.

DKIM is a transport signature, which in this case shows that the message was 
sent from the author
to the mailing list system.  List apply their own DKIM signature on the mail 
they send.
Mailing lists have been editing messages for 40 years, long before anyone
ever thought of DKIM or DMARC.   It is a well known DMARC failure that it 
doesn't work with mailing lists.
Some people have tried to rewrite history and claim that it is the lists' fault 
but they are wrong.

The whole point of ARC is to provide recipient systems with info to help 
recognize when they should
ignore DMARC and deliver mail from lists and other legitimate senders that 
don't happen to match the
assumptions that DMARC makes.

I disagree.

You're welcome to your opinion, but you don't get to rewrite 40 years of history. We've spent a decade with people insisting that the entire e-mail world has to change the way it works to conform to the lastest FUSSP. We saw it with SPF, we're seeing it with DMARC. It didn't hapen with SPF, and it's not happening with DMARC. For example, mailing lists have been editing messages for a long time, they have good reasons to do so, and they're not going to stop.

I'm not guessing about the reasons for ARC, I know the people who developed it and I believe I am correctly describing the reason they invented it. It includes some of the largest mail providers in the world. They all use DMARC, and they understand that DMARC's limitations cause a lot of gratuitous pain for their users who've been using mailing lists for a long time. It's not a large fraction of the total amount of mail, but it's a large fraction of the mail they care about.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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