On Wed, 10 Apr 2024 at 08:50, Jeremy Nicoll <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I just noticed that some posts here show the poster's own email address
> whereas others have something like
>
>   [email protected]


 This is a workaround invented by Lsoft (the makers of LISTSERV) for
changes made around ten years ago by Google and other "big tech" companies
that largely broke the decades-old world of mailing lists.

A cynic would say that Google et al just want to keep everyone and
everything "on platform", i.e. not support nasty things like mailing lists
because they allow people to communicate without going through them. Google
would say it's all about avoiding spam and phishing emails.

Essentially things go wrong because LISTSERV is unable to sign (loosely
speaking) an email that it receives from a subscriber and wants to relay to
the list. And if a recipient's mail system rejects it for that reason, then
LISTSERV generates a random email address @ the LISTSERV address, and sends
from that address (which of course it *is* authorized to send from). If
someone responds directly to a list poster who has such a generated email
address, LISTSERV will forward it on, but of course that introduces a third
party into the email chain. Nobody wants that, but it makes the best of a
bad situation.

If you look back at archives or your own personal mail, you can see some
people's list email addresses change over time as their mail provider has
changed their policies and LISTSERV dynamically assigns one of their
xxx-dmarc- things.

If you go to the Lsoft site https://lsoft.com and search there for "dmarc",
you'll see a bunch of stuff on how they deal with the problems.It's not
pretty, but it mostly works.

Does the latter indicate a post made via newsgroup bit.listserv.ibm-main
> (if the gateway between NNTP & listserv still works?) while the former
> indicate "posts" made directly to the listserv by email?


I don't think it has anything to do with NNTP and such. It's all about how
strict a given list subscriber's email handling is.

Tony H.

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