[Discuss] DMARC issue, Yahoo and beyond

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

On May 27, 2014, at 10:50 AM, "Edward Ned Harvey (blu)" <blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:

> I'm not really sure where this thread got to - I got lost in things that sounded like people philosophizing on the way things should be, without tying it back to the real world.


I've mostly avoided commenting on this, because the reply-to flame war is one of those recurring disputes that flares up periodically and accomplishes nothing. 

When I first set up the lists, almost 20 years ago, I set the reply-to to the list address, which was the common practice at the time. The first time this argument came up, I was persuaded by the paper "Reply-To Considered Harmful", and I changed the list config based on that. 

The next time the argument flared up, I came to realize that both sides had compelling arguments, the people who seemed to care about the issue were a very small fraction of the community, and the numbers of such people on each side of the argument seemed to be about the same. 

Somebody suggested voting on the issue, and it was clear that if we did this, we'd be voting on it every time the argument recurred, with the result that the list's behavior would be arbitrarily changed periodically. 

I decided that changing the list behavior back and forth arbitrarily would be far more disruptive than the consequences of either setting. 

That was probably about 10-15 years ago.