I'm not seeing it

Posted Aug 3, 2025 15:07 UTC (Sun) by ametlwn (subscriber, #10544)
In reply to: I'm not seeing it by KJ7RRV
Parent article: The NNCPNET email network

Mail hosting moving to a duopoly makes running a mail server harder in multiple ways:
* Standards move in questionable directions (e.g. rfc 8461 MTA-STS).
* Interest on the free software authors side in SMTP software is waning. e.g. libsrs2, libspf, opendkim, opendmarc are all dead-upstream.

I'm not seeing it

Posted Aug 3, 2025 16:34 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

I do agree this is a dangerous trend. As for the upstream projects being dead, maybe they're just finished? The relevant standards (SPF, SRS, DKIM, DMARC) haven't changed in a while and so if the software implements all of the standards, then what more is needed?

To comment on another post that said "To configure all this on a bare Debian installation is way too much work, and error-prone, too.", maybe, or maybe not. I set up everything on a bare Debian installation and it's fine. However, I did own an email security company for 19 years and am the author of Mailmunge, an email filtering framework, so I have a lot of practice!

I also agree that RFC 8461 is a terrible RFC. Having an SMTP client fetch a policy over HTTPS is just too dumb for words.

I'm not seeing it

Posted Aug 3, 2025 16:40 UTC (Sun) by ametlwn (subscriber, #10544) [Link]

At least libspf2 is not finished, which was the reason that nixpkgs switched to a fork. (It was alive then but now looks dead, too.)

I'm not seeing it

Posted Aug 3, 2025 16:35 UTC (Sun) by ametlwn (subscriber, #10544) [Link]

Claiming OpenDmarc was dead was to strong, sorry. I would revise that to the project is struggling.