Re: Mailing lists - assumptions

On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 08:15:37AM -0700, Ned Freed wrote:
> > Some universities offer their alumni "email forwarding for life".
> > That's a solution that would work for some.  Unfortunately, not for
> > the less technically savvy.
> 
> Alas, it's a solution that interacts poorly with SPF, which is also in the
> mix. There are better technical alternatives to address SPF issues with
> forwarders than there are to address DKIM issues with mailing lists, but
> even so it's not a panacea.

The way alum.mit.edu handles email forwarding for life is they provide
an authenticated submission service for MIT alumni[1].  This handles SPF
and DKIM on the outgoing side, and on the forwarding side, it looks to
the e-mail provider that that an address such as "[email protected]"
is a mailing list.

[1] https://alum.mit.edu/help/EmailForwardingFAQ

So that means that it's possible to have EFL where the outgoing e-mail
will both pass SPF and DKIM checks.  And better yet, since it's in
MIT's interest to keep their alumni happy (especially those that might
potentially donate a huge amount of money in the future, for a
building or an endowed chair), the financial incentives are relatively
well aligned to keep the service running.  :-)

Actually, in practice, I've not had to use the authenticated
submission service.  Despite that mit.edu and alum.mit.edu has an SPF
soft fail if you don't go through their authenticated e-mail
submission service, I've found that an SPF soft fail combined with an
authenticated DKIM for my envelope return address (for thunk.org,
which I control), is not a problem in practice.  I've not experienced
any problems with my e-mail getting rejected.

					- Ted

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