Hello,
Currently this mailing list has MIME-part filtering turned on, which
will results in "From:" address munging (appending ".INVALID" to the
sender's email address) for domains enforcing strict DMARC rules, such
as apple.com, zoho.com and all Yahoo.** domains. This behaviour may
cause some emails being treated as spam by the recipients' email service
providers, because the result "From:" address, such as
"some...@yahoo.com.INVALID" is not valid and cannot be verified.
I have created a Jira ticket INFRA-22548
<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-22548> asking to change
this, but the Infra team said dropping certain MIME part types is to
prevent spam and harmful attachments, and would require a consensus from
the project before they can make the change. Therefore I'm sending this
email asking for your opinions on this.
To be clear, turning off the MIME-part filtering will not turn off the
anti-spam and anti-virus feature on the mailing list, all emails sent to
the list will still need to pass the checks before being forwarded to
subscribers. Morden (since 90s?) anti-spam and anti-virus software will
scan the MIME parts too, in addition to the plain-text and/or HTML email
body. Your email service provider is also almost certainly going to have
their own anti-spam and anti-virus software, in addition to the one on
the mailing list. The difference is whether the mailing list proactively
removing MIME parts not in the predefined whitelist.
To help you understand the change, here's the difference between the two
behaviours:
With the MIME-part filtering enabled (current behaviour)
* the mailing list will remove certain MIME-part types, such as
executable file attachments, before forwarding it
* the mailing list will append ".INVALID" to some senders' email address
* the emails from the "*@*.INVALID" sender address are more likely to
end up in recipients' spam folder
* it's harder for people to directly reply to someone who's email
address has been modified in this way
* recipients running their own email server without anti-spam and/or
anti-virus software on it have some extra protections
With MIME-part filtering disabled
* the mailing list forward all non-spam and non-infected emails as it is
without changing them
* the mailing list will not change senders' email address
* the emails from this mailing list are less likely to end up in
recipients' spam folder
* it's easier for people to directly reply to anyone in this mailing list
* recipients running their own email server without anti-spam and/or
anti-virus software on it may be exposed to some threats
What's your opinion on this? Do you support or oppose disabling the
MIME-part filtering on the Cassandra-dev mailing list?
p.s.: as you can see, my email address has the ".INVALID" appended to it
by this mailing list.
Regards,
Bowen
