[EM] Should we allow "voting off" this mailing list?

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2024-07-23 20:45, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> The goofy thing is, I have check and I never received any of these
> posts from Kevin Venzke <stepjak at yahoo.fr> nor from Toby Pereira
> <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> (that MO referred to) nor from most other posts
> that I see now at the archive
> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2024-July/thread.html .
> 
> I checked my spam folder and nothing from [EM] in that.

I changed my email address before rejoining the list, and I found that 
my email host initially classified a considerable fraction of the list 
mails as spam, including Toby's. I dealt with this by turning off the 
spam filter, but it's possible your host has an upper spamminess 
threshold above which messages don't even go to spam, but are just deleted.

The primary cause of my provider classifying thes mails as spam is that 
DMARC doesn't play nice with mailing lists. The SpamAssassin report from 
my provider for one of Toby's messages - the one archived as 
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2024-July/006588.html 
- shows as much:

X-Provider-AR: spf=pass dkim=fail arc=fail dmarc=fail.reject
X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Score: 15.1
X-Spam-Report: 15.1 hits;
	*  0.8 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
	*               [Blocked - see 
<https://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?199.10.31.237>]
	* -0.0 SPF_PASS               SPF: sender matches SPF record
	*  0.2 DKIM_ADSP_CUSTOM_MED   No valid author signature, adsp_override is
	*                             CUSTOM_MED
	*  0.0 SPF_HELO_NONE          SPF: HELO does not publish an SPF Record
	*  0.0 ARC_SIGNED             Message has a ARC signature
	*  0.0 ARC_VALID              Message has a valid ARC signature
	*  1.5 X_FREEMAIL_FROM_NO_ABUSE_DEPT Freemail service with dysfunctional
	*                             abuse department and high spam occurrence
	*  1.5 X_FREEMAIL_RECV_NO_ABUSE_DEPT Freemail service with dysfunctional
	*                             abuse department and high spam occurrence
	*  0.0 X_AR_DKIM_FAIL         DKIM validation failed
	* -0.0 X_AR_SPF_PASS          SPF validation passed
	*  0.5 FREEMAIL_FROM          Sender email is commonly abused enduser 
mail provider
	*                             [tdp201b(at)yahoo.co.uk]
	*  0.0 HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS From and EnvelopeFrom 2nd level mail
	*                             domains are different
	*  0.1 MIME_HTML_MOSTLY       BODY: Multipart message mostly text/html MIME
	*  0.0 HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message
	* -0.0 MAILING_LIST_MULTI     Multiple indicators imply a widely-seen list
	*                             manager
	*   10 X_AR_DMARC_FAIL_REJECT DMARC validation failed, policy says reject
	*  0.0 FREEMAIL_FORGED_FROMDOMAIN 2nd level domains in From and 
EnvelopeFrom
	*                              freemail headers are different
	*  0.5 X_SEX_SPAM_01          Message contains one sex-related term

It gets 10 penalty points just from "X_AR_DMARC_FAIL_REJECT". (I have no 
idea what the "sex-related term" is.)

I must admit that I'm no DMARC expert, but apparently there are three 
ways to deal with this:
	- Mess with From headers or use MIME encapsulation: 
https://dmarcian.com/mailing-lists-dmarc/ and 
https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DMARC?highlight=%28DMARC%29
	- Don't alter the Subject field: mail subjects would just be "Novel 
strategy-proof election method" instead of "[EM] Novel strategy-proof 
election method". Then rely on DKIM authentication: 
https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-09-18-dmarc-mailing-list.html
	- Use ARC: 
https://mxtoolbox.com/dmarc/details/arc/dmarc-authenticated-received-chain 
and 
https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/handlers/docs/arc_sign.html

To me, the ARC approach seems to be the least hacky one.

-km