[gnso-rds-pdp-data] Mailing List Configuration Update

[Michele Neylon - Blacknight]

All

ICANN has made some changes to how the mailing list is configured which should hopefully address the issue where people accidentally reply to the sender instead of the list.

Details below:

“Dear all,

Please see below the final update from IT, you may wish to share it with your subgroups, we have cleared with IT that it is fine to circulate the explanation: 

"Today I went ahead and updated the settings on all the mailman mailing lists so that the sender and related headers are configured in the same manner.

In most cases the reply and reply-all functionality will work as expected.  However if the sender has very strict sender verification policies published then the reply-all functionality will not work on Outlook for PC.  Fortunately these strict policies are not very prevalent at this time.

Sender domain email authentication policies or signatures such as DMARC, SPF/DKIM are used to tell if the sending email server is authorized to send from a specific domain.  Not all systems receiving emails check DMARC or SPF settings and not all domains have SPF or DMARC configured.  Furthermore there are policies in place saying what to do when you receive an email from an unauthorized sender, the options are reject, quarantine or none (none is up to the recipient).

Mailing list servers have historically resent emails from the sender.  So if david.prangnell at gmail.com sent an email to an ICANN mailing list mailinglist at icann.org the ICANN mailing list server would resend the email out to all the recipients from david.prangnell at gmail.com.  This is problematic because ICANN is not authorized to send emails from gmail.com.  With this historical set up, reply and reply-all work as expected, however as explained above, if the sender has DMARC configured with a policy to reject or quarantine, and the recipient is doing sender verification, these emails will not be received.

Today I configured our mailing list servers to change the from address to being the list only in the cases where the sender has the DMARC policy set to reject or quarantine.

I have tested the reply and reply-all behavior on the following email clients:

* Outlook PC
* Outlook Mac
* Gmail
* Yahoo

The mailing lists should behave as follows:

* When a member of a list clicks on "Reply" the email should go to the sender only.
* When a member of a list clicks on "Reply-all" the email should go to the sender and the list.


The reply-all behavior works as expected unless the sender is from Yahoo, or any sender that has a DMARC policy set to reject or quarantine.’



Thank you all for your patience here,

Kind regards

Nathalie

"
--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
Hosting, Colocation & Domains
http://www.blacknight.host/
http://blog.blacknight.com/
http://ceo.hosting/ 
Intl. +353 (0) 59  9183072
Direct Dial: +353 (0)59 9183090
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