[Koha] Can the Koha Mailing List and DMARC become friends?

[Thomas Dukleth]

[Reply inline.]

On Fri, March 10, 2023 14:24, David Liddle wrote:

[...]

>
> 1. Can you clarify in which sense you mean "offline use"? Some people
> describe themselves as offline when they don't have a web browser open
> but are still very much connected to the internet. For others, it just
> means that they're not logged in to the specific site or service in
> question. Then there are the people who are fully offline, making only
> occasional connections to the internet to collect mail by POP.

I had meant some form of only occasional connections to the internet.  The
vast majority of mailing list subscribers may have high availability
relatively low cost internet connections.  However, we should not exclude
the less fortunate where Koha may still serve people well.  Some less
developed places have institutional islands where Koha would be suitable
to an institution which is an island with some connectivity in the midst
of an internet connectivity desert where internet connectivity has limited
availability and high metered expense.  Institutional intranet can serve
Koha while internet access is not used much.  In such circumstances,
people read messages anytime which had been collected via POP or offline
IMAP when briefly online and queue messages which they have composed for
when they are briefly online again.  The use case is also the same for
people who live just outside some internet coverage area but work where
internet is more readily available.

I have read that some people have configured Discourse so that they can
interact entirely from email and never have to interact directly with the
Discourse server.  However, Hyperkitty for Mailman 3 may serve users
better.

[...]

> Again, a platform change is just something to consider. If there's no
> critical mass of people reporting that the communications platforms
> are insufficient or unsatisfying, then it's not worth discussing or
> pursuing. I just know for a fact that messages are not getting
> delivered to some subscribers because of address spoofing. The list
> will have to deal with that sooner or later, in one fashion or
> another.

A Discourse forum has been raised previously as a way to raise engagement
for users who do not currently engage on the mailing list.

A major issue is how much extra work maintaining a forum would be.

Are the anti-spam tools or message review tools as helpful as what we
currently have for the mailing list?  There have been many subscribers to
the mailing list from people whose systems are infected by a variety of
spambots.

If people want a forum which also severs as a mailing list, Hyperkitty in
Mailman 3 provides date based access to archives as opposed to sequence
based access to archives.  For Discourse servers which I tested, I did not
find any evident means to access archives by some date based period of
time nor any evident effective means to include date in a search query. 
Maybe there is some way of configuring date based access to messages which
I did not see.

Both Discourse and Hyperkitty use continuous scrolling for the next page
of content which generally breaks returning to access a particular place
in a list of messages without accessing a particular message.  Date based
access provides some mitigation for Hyperkitty and both Discourse and
Hyperkitty provide proper paginated access for indexing robots run by
Google, Bing, etc. or otherwise perhaps JavaScript disabled on the client
side.

Mailman 3 still does not have feature parity with Mailman 2 but maybe we
are not using or do not need Mailman 2 features which are not currently
present in Mailman 3.

The easiest thing to do for the moment is to Mung the from header in
Mailman 2 to support DMARC.  I have not found notice of any software
project mailing list adopting the MIME wrapping approach to DMARC which
has too much of an adverse risk of having messages appear as attachments
instead of the body for some users.  MIME wrapping is probably better
suited as a DMARC approach when all subscribers work for the same company
using only company supplied email software to read the company mailing
list.

[...]

Thomas Dukleth
Agogme
109 E 9th Street, 3D
New York, NY  10003
USA
http://www.agogme.com
+1 212-674-3783