Yahoo DMARC breakage

Thu Apr 10 11:29:12 UTC 2014

An aside:

On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 05:15:59PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
> Maybe this is a good thing - we can stop getting all the "sorry I'm
> out of the office" emails when posting to a list.

I entirely support that goal, but my preferred solution is the complete
eradication of the software (a lot of which makes mistakes that have
been well-known as mistakes for decades) and thus the entire practice
of setting up "out of office" messages.

Out-of-office notices might have had some relevance 20 or 30 years ago
when much of the population was new to email and had not yet grasped
in *any* sense how it works.  And when there was a large overlap
between "people who use email" and "people who read/send email
from their offices and only from their offices".

But I think by now everyone who is capable of being educated has been
educated and realizes that the one of the reasons for the absence of a
response is that the recipient hasn't seen the relevant message yet.
There's really no need to spin the roulette wheel and hope that the
combination of MUAs and MTAs on both ends is functional enough to enable
the out-of-office software (optimistically presuming it's halfway sane)
to figure out what it should do.

And that's before we even get to the security and privacy issues
that are in play, which are substantial.

So while there are numerous approaches to solving the problem of
errant out-of-office messages, and some of those approaches work
pretty well in the field, I would prefer to kill the problem by
attacking the source: the *existence* of out-of-office autoresponders.

---rsk