[Xapian-discuss] Administrivia: Problems caused by Yahoo addresses

Eric Wong e at 80x24.org
Sat Sep 12 10:23:27 BST 2015


Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:
> A few hours ago 20 addresses got unsubscribed from this list due to
> bounces caused by Yahoo's DMARC p=reject policy:
> 
> https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN24050.html
> 
> This breaks mailing lists.  Yahoo are well aware of this, but don't seem
> to care:

Fwiw, mailman has a 'cleanse-dkim' handler which strips DKIM-related
headers entirely.  Maybe that's enough to get mails through...

I haven't used Mailman myself, but I took the hint from Mailman and
strip those same headers in the public-inbox.org MDA code[1] before it
(optionally) gets sent through mlmmj.

But then again there are no active Yahoo posters on lists I run...
There have not been any bounces from Yahoo lurkers, though.

> The other option is to ban posting to the list from Yahoo addresses (and
> similarly for any other email providers who implement policies that
> cause collateral damage such as this).  You could probably still
> subscribe from such addresses, but it would be read-only.
> 
> Any thoughts?

Unfortunately, I suspect things like this Yahoo change are sign of
things to come with big mail providers continuing to make life harder
for independent admins.

(Trying not hijack and promote my own project, here, but then again
 it is the reason I started using Xapian :)

  Things like this Yahoo change is one of the reasons I chose to take an
  "archives first" approach to mailing lists with public-inbox.  Email
  gets dumped into a git repository whic can get mirrored and synced
  efficiently.  Readers can subscribe via git://, Atom feed or follow
  along on a Xapian-backed website.  I'll hopefully have an NNTP
  server up in a week or so.

  Having these options will hopefully avoid problems of push-based SMTP
  delivery.  Unfortunately most mailing list participants are still used
  to getting email pushed to them.

  I also encourage reply-to-all with public-inbox since it makes the
  list server less of a single-point-of-failure and encourages drive-by
  posters.


[1] git clone git://80x24.org/public-inbox
    (still terribly undocumented at the moment)
</end promotion>



More information about the Xapian-discuss mailing list