Regarding gatewaying gnu.org, nongnu.org and libreplanet.org mailing list to Gmane

Dmitry Alexandrov <[email protected]> Tue, 16 Jun 2020 08:55:10 +0300

Newsgroups	gmane.discuss
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Dear Ian (or anyone this might concern),

as you probably know, many public mailing lists hosted on gnu.org, nongnu.org and libreplanet.org and operated under your care, are connected to Gmane <news://news.gmane.io> — a bidirectional isolated (from Usenet) NNTP server, run by the Gnusʼ author Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen.

For some reason nobody knows for sure now, few of them contracted an option to mung all the mail addresses in all the mail passed via list — see an example below.  Perhaps, someone who had sent an initial request to add the list to Gmane (anyone could do that) was not careful enough to uncheck that option, which for a long time was a default.

This was a tolerable annoyance initially: one could still reply to any post by mail, and Gmane would restore original addresses; alternatively one could post a followup via NNTP.

However, itʼs not anymore tolerable due to (well-known to you) widespread of DKIM/DMARC: signing a header containing munged addresses results in invalid signature after they are restored.  And NNTP-clients do not support signing outcoming articles with DKIM at all; and even if they do, it would have no use for anyone who does not own a domain name.

In other words, a user experience is worse than if mailing lists in question were entirely absent from Gmane — they are _unreliable_: anyone posting to, for example, [email protected] via Gmane have good chances of being posting straight to the junk folder.

Gmane no longer provides an option to enable address munging, yet despite all of the above, Lars considers it rude to disable it without asking an explicit permission from people in charge of the mailing lists already affected.

This mail is a request for such a permission.

(unnamed) (message/rfc822, 10.3 KB) - not displayed

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 247 B)