In a message written on Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 08:58:38AM -0600, Grant Taylor via NANOG wrote:
I also strongly recommend that mailing lists be viewed as an entity unto themselves. I.e. they receive the email, process it, and generate a new email /from/ /their/ /own/ /address/ with very similar content as the message they received.
I strongly encourage mailing list admins to enable Variable Envelope Return Path to help identify which subscribed recipient causes each individual bounce, even if the problem is from downstream forwards.
The problem with this is that it takes more processing power and bandwidth. Most people simply want an old school expansion that re-sends the same, unmodified, message to multiple recipients. - That methodology's heyday has come and mostly gone.
Actually, my problem is not so much processing power and bandwidth, but that every time I've encountered this problem I found a morass of painfully broken, horribly documented, super-complex software. With sendmail/postfix you can edit an alias file and say: bob: joe, tim, alex And boom, done. If I could enable some feature/module/whatever in either one with a line or two of config to make that do Variable Envelope Return Path I would, but every solution I know of requires setting up a complex milter, running some external daemon, which often depends on 3 different interpreted languages to be installed and so on down a dependency hell. While I haven't looked at real mailing list software recently (e.g. mailman) when I last did they didn't suport this either and it took a pile of 3rd party hacks to make it work. Why o why in 2017 can this not be a checkbox, a line of config, or so on. For that matter, setting up DKIM is horrendously complicated for no good reason... -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/