Cypherpunks nameserver changes will happen Wednesday

Greg Newby gbnewby at pglaf.org
Tue Apr 30 22:07:22 PDT 2019


Dearest colleagues,

Riad and I are planning on coordinating some changes to the DNS entries for the cpunks.org domain, sometime during US business hours on May 1. Basically, we will be splitting out lists.cpunks.org (the PGLAF.org server, which I run and is where this list lives) as a subdomain in the DNS, separately from the rest of cpunks.org (which Riad runs, and mostly redirects to lists.cpunks.org anyway).

If the change goes well, nothing noticeable will happen and emails to the list will continue to flow.

If the change goes poorly, there might be some email messages that bounce or are delayed. I will send an email update to the list when the change is done, to test that things are working.

Once things have been working for a few days, I will then make some updates to the DNS records to improve adherence to modern email anti-spam "standards" (DKIM, SPF and DMARC). This should cut down on messages that are quarantined or rejected by many large email providers. 

Those anti-spam measures are a good topic for discussion. They have some merit in identifying the validity of the servers that messages come from. But they don't help with validating the sender, or non-repudiation, or other features that have existed at least as long as PGP. 

It's not easy to run your own mail transport agent these days. Here is a little article from some other victims of the behemoth ISPs: https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_is_eating_our_mail/

Best wishes for a Happy May Day, to all.  
  - Greg 


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