Re: Lack of replies
On January 4, 2024 3:15:29 PM UTC, Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:
>On Thu, Jan 04, 2024 at 03:54:28PM +0100, Daniel Gröber wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 05:10:43PM +0000, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> > >At least people could be warned that because of the domain they send
>> > >from their mail might not get through.
>> > >
>> > My guess is that such a warning email (which is the only way we'd have to
>> > do it) would also cause a lot of complaints.
>>
>> > I think we [...] will need to have the BTS send all emails from
>> > bugs.debian.org role addresses and not use the sender's email in From
>> > anymore.
>>
>> Just to make sure I understand the constraints: we can determine at sending
>> time whether a particular domain is going to cause trouble or not, right?
>> If so could this rewrite scheme be applied only for recipients where it's
>> absolutely necessary?
>
>I haven't looked into this in a lot of detail, but my concern would be
>that that would end up being flaky and confusing in practice. I think
>people want the behaviour of the BTS to be easily predictable without
>having to get an advanced degree in MTA debugging first.
>
I agree that inconsistent behavior is concerning. IETF mailing lists selectively rewrite From based on domain DMARC and it seems to be mostly okay. It may be that the typical IETF participant knows more about email than the typical BTS user.
Personally, I worry more about the added complexity and maintainability. It's timely that this
Niklaus Wirth quote from 2008: A Brief History of Software Engineering by Niklaus Wirth showed up in my Mastodon feed yesterday:
“A primary effort must be education toward a sense of quality. Programmers must become engaged crusaders against home-made complexity. The cancerous growth of complexity is not a thing to be admired; it must be fought wherever possible.”
I think it's definitely possible to avoid this complexity, so we probably should.
Scott K
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