no more subject prefix for xetex mailing list

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Tue, 5 Mar 2019, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> problem. Gmail accepts majority of such mails. Only if I display the
> original message, I can see DKIM FAIL and DMARC FAIL. However, I had
> problems with forwarded messages and important invoices were not

It would certainly be better that the mailing list rewrite From: *and*
also implement all of SPF/DKIM/DMARC properly, too.  But just rewriting
the From: header with no other changes would be an improvement on the
current situation where list messages are hostage to DMARC policies set by
original-authors' domains.  And I'd advocate it as a first step because
it's something that can probably be done by the list administrator acting
alone, without needing to also coordinate with whoever runs the mail
server, whoever has administration control over the domain, and so on.

I don't see a downside to implementing From: rewriting.  Do that, even all
by itself, and some significant amount of mail which currently fails will
get through, while little or no mail which currently gets through will
start to fail.  It seems like a good first step toward the more
complicated "Right Thing" solution, and it is a necessary part of the
more complicated solution anyway.

As I mentioned earlier, From: rewriting might be bad for a list that wants
to send replies to the original authors instead of to the list by default,
but since the XeTeX list is already setting Reply-To: to the list, that's
evidently not an issue in this case.

Google can't be trusted to let through every important message.  I run a
monthly newsletter for my small business that still gets routinely filed
under "spam" by Google even though it is opt-in subscription only and
Google's own status display says that the messages pass all of SPF, DKIM,
and DMARC.  We can't expect all mailing list messages to pass Google.
But they are more likely to do if they have the From: headers rewritten to
a domain that will, at the very least, pass SPF.

-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before tribes.
https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/