I really appreciate that freelists.org keeps its mailing lists free from
advertising and spam. I honestly hope we can keep that up in the future ...
Anyway, I did some research about the dmarc-stuff and found this:
The "dmarc-noreply" address means that you have either a yahoo.com or other
email address that runs through Yahoo servers (such as sbcglobal.net and a few
others.) That was the solution the tech guys at Freelists came up with to
avoid having to outright ban yahoo.com addresses, due to the frequent hacking
which occurs with that provider in particular (their online security is
notorious among listserv owners and admins for being particularly atrocious.)
At least once every year, nearly all of the yahoo.com (and many other
associated addresses) would get kicked off of Wisbirdn by the Freelists.org
servers, due to spam from a hacked Yahoo address, which would trigger error
warnings for all of those addresses. Listowner Tom Sykes was on the verge of
giving up and banning all yahoo.com addresses (several years ago, he banned all
aol.com addresses because of their even worse security issues.) The guys at
Freelists had been having the same issues with many of the other email
listservs that they host. They came up with the "dmarc-noreply" strategy,
which allows users to post to the list and receive all Wisbirdn emails, but not
to receive direct responses. For reasons I won't go into, this prevents one
hacked email address from triggering a cascade that gets all of the other
addresses using that ISP kicked off the list.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but that's what's going on. You can get
around the "dmarc-noreply" by putting your actual email address within the body
of your message (or a signature block,) should you want to people to be able to
respond to you directly.
