Big ISPs hate mailing lists because they generate a lot of mail that people actually want to receive (can’t treat it like spam without losing a customer) and because messages from mailing lists are typically much larger than messages from friends or relatives. If I wore a tin hat, I would speculate that perhaps Yahoo introduced this change for the specific purpose of trying to kill all mailing lists so they can lose less money. And I’d eat my tin hat if they backed off.

 

The change we are working on requires a code update and nothing else. All you will have to do is install the update and the problem will be solved not just for Yahoo but for any other future ISP that decides to do the same thing. The change will have no impact on subscribers who do not use Yahoo, and minimal impact on Yahoo users. Everything will continue to work as it does now. Private replies won’t start going to the list without warning as is the case with the solution that DMARC is recommending (because they don’t understand mailing lists and don’t care, at least for the big ISPs).

 

This will be released as maintenance for 16.0 and will of course be included in 16.5. If you need a retrofit for an older version it can be attempted on a consulting basis, but given the number of hours we have thrown at this problem so far I am expecting it would cost $50-100k per release, and maintenance would have to be on a consulting basis. Probably easier to convince one’s boss to upgrade J

 

  Eric

 

From: LISTSERV Site Administrators' Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Wayne Smith
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 12:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Yahoo! and the "p=reject" DMARC fiasco

 

On LSTOWN-L, Ben Parker wrote, in part:

Longer term solutions:

L-Soft is working on a change to LISTSERV that will basically re-write the From: *@yahoo.com addresses to something that does not cause the bounce/rejection problem.  This requires changes at the server level and is not accessible to subscribers or List Owners.  This is in testing now.  One problem with this approach is that such re-written From: addresses will likely go into your "spam" folder where you may not see them. Although this is problematic in itself, this is somewhat better than not allowing any messages from *@yahoo.com address at all.

 

 I have some questions for LSoft.

  • In your opinion, is their hope Yahoo! will back off this change?  Is LSoft pursuing this avenue?
    • I saw one ridiculous graph that was supposed to validate the Yahoo! change, which showed Yahoo! users posted to mailing lists once for every 99.5 spam/phishing mail received.
  • Will this change, now in test, be applicable to various Listserv levels? Which ones?
  • Will this change, now in test, be implemented w/o a Listserv code change via configuration and/or exits?
  • Will this change, now in test, affect or be affected by list settings?
  • Will this change, now in test, affect the ways a recipient reads or replies to a distribution?
  • Will this change, now in test, be applicable only to yahoo.* posts, or will it affect all distributions?
  • What did I neglect to ask?

On my Listserv server, I added a "Filter_also= *@yahoo.*" configuration line early Tuesday, but not in time for to save DMARC-related subscription terminations on many of my lists, some of which were substantial in number (the list I started looking at had 50 out of 350 subscriptions terminated).

I mention this only as a wake-up call to Listserv maintainers that haven't yet addressed the problem.  If you haven't notified your list owners and/or looked at recent AUTODEL records in your list changelogs, maybe you should?

That said, no workaround I've seen suggested anywhere seem palatable for all of our sites and mailing lists (except for Yahoo! backing off their change).  :-(


Cheers, Wayne
Wayne T Smith - [log in to unmask] - UMS-ITS-ECAS

 

To unsubscribe from the LSTSRV-L list, click the following link:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTSRV-L&A=1


To unsubscribe from the LSTSRV-L list, click the following link:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTSRV-L&A=1