Re: Membership disabled due to excessive bounces

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Today is the second time I receive a membership deletion email from the
> mailing list (first one was on the 31st of October).
>
> It starts with:
>
>> Your membership in the mailing list Guix-devel has been disabled due
>> to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated
>> 11-Nov-2018.  You will not get any more messages from this list until
>> you re-enable your membership.  You will receive 3 more reminders like
>> this before your membership in the list is deleted.
>
> I've re-enabled my membership both times.
>
> My email is hosted by https://gandi.net (I use their email hosting
> service).  I send emails with Emacs' mu4e if that matters.
>
> Does anyone know why this happens?  I've never had this issue before
> with any other mailing list (most of them also hosted by Mailman).

It's happening because there's a Guix developer, who will remain
unnamed, who has configured a very strict DMARC policy for their email
domain, and the GNU infrastructure is not currently able to cope well
with this.  There are at least two unresolved issues:

(1) When Guix developers push commits to our git repository, Savannah
sends a notification email on their behalf, with the developer's email
address in the "From:" header.

(2) GNU Mailman apparently breaks the DKIM signatures on replies in some
cases, due to its processing of the mail and its modification of certain
mail headers.

In both cases, the end result is that messages sent on this developer's
behalf by Savannah or GNU Mailman are rejected by email providers that
honor this developer's strict DMARC policy.

Solutions exist for both of these problems.  The latest version of GNU
Mailman apparently avoids breaking DKIM signatures, and the git
notification commit could be changed to use a different email address in
the "From:" header.

However, it will take some time for the GNU sysadmins to upgrade
Mailman.  In the meantime, unless the Guix developer will agree to
change their DMARC policy (which they seem very reluctant to do), I'm
sorry to report that we will have to live with this issue for a while
longer.

      Mark