[postgis-devel] DMARC/DKIM mitigation on maling lists

[Sandro Santilli]

Modern email spam-prevention policy use email signing
and modifying email body (and sometimes headers) breaks
the signatures, resulting in mailing list messages sometime
going to spam folders of subscribers.

I'm planning to experiment changing the Mailman configuration
for the postgis-tickets mailing list [1] to serve as a kind
of testbed for signed-email-handling improvements.

The change would be:

  - Stop adding a [postgis-tickets] suffix in the subject line
  - Stop adding a footer to every email

The rationale is that the same information is already included
in the messages in form of RFC822 headers:

  - List-Id
  - List-Unsubscribe
  - List-Archive
  - List-Post
  - List-Help
  - List-Subscribe

DMARC/DKIM problems have been reported for other osgeo mailing
lists and so far the solution implemented has been to that of
changing the From and Reply-To headers, but only when the sender
has DMARC active, which introduces more complexity instead of
reducing it:

  - https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/2726
  - https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/2639

I'm adding in cc Paolo as someone who's known to have a DMARC enabled
domain and thus in a position to test with this, Greg who's a
proponent of reduced complexity in mailing lists and Markus who
confirmed grass-dev having similar troubles.

This mail thread should have maybe started on the OSGeo Projects
mailing list but I'm using postgis-devel as I only intend to tweak
`postgis-tickets` list for tests, and if we find the test is
successful we could suggest to projects to tweak ALL lists like this.

Does anyone in PostGIS team have reasons to hold back from changing
the postgis-tickets mailing lits ? It only has 22 subscribers so
sounds like a great fit to me :)


[1] https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/postgis-tickets

--strk;

  Libre GIS consultant/developer
  https://strk.kbt.io/services.html