add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?

[Russ Allbery]

Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> writes:
> On 3/12/23 1:29 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> This battle was lost years and years ago for most email.  The majority
>> of email addresses used by regular people silently throw away messages.

> Let's agree to disagree.

Are you sure you want to disagree given your agreement below about Gmail?
25% of all email addresses in the world are hosted by Gmail, so if you
agree with me about Gmail, we're halfway to my assertion already.  :)  But
anyway, this is really somewhat beside the point.

>> Now, maybe this isn't true of moderators, who are probably odd, unusual
>> people compared to most email users.  But also note that rejecting a
>> moderated group submission is in practice equivalent to silently
>> dropping it; the bounce message is unlikely to go anywhere useful
>> unless you have a particularly obsessive local news administrator.

> I don't know what the expected norm is for moderated newsgroups.  With my
> postmaser hat on, I'd somewhat expect a message to go back to the
> purported poser indicating that their message had been rejected.

Use of fake email addresses on Usenet is ubiquitous, and those who don't
use them are often using providers with SPF or DMARC, so lifting the email
address of the poster into the envelope sender is a recipe for various
errors or straight-up rejection of messages due to DMARC rules or even
basic deliverability checks.  Instead, messages normally have the local
newsmaster mailbox as the envelope sender, so that's where the bounces go.
(I believe that's the only thing INN supports, although I haven't looked
at it recently and maybe my memory is faulty.)

Maybe now that Usenet has become sort of a niche hobby some percentage of
newsmasters would look at that mailbox.  Certainly a few years ago when
commercial providers were common, essentially no one bothered.

>> Out of curiosity, I checked, and only two moderators currently use
>> Gmail as a submission address (and I suspect those are both dead
>> groups; almost all moderated gorups are dead).

> /me winces

> Given Gmail's propensity to filter things, I suspect that moderated
> messages rarely make it into the moderator's mailboxes.

Exactly.

And while you and I may wince about the amount of mail that gets lost, I
spend enough time still talking to regular email users to be quite certain
that Gmail's behavior is basically what they want.  They may get annoyed
around the edges, but they definitely would not tolerate the sort of spam
situation that I tolerate.  I know even technical people who were used to
running their own mail servers who switched to Gmail and were amazed at
how much better the spam filtering was and how much they preferred losing
mail occasionally to having to deal with the spam.  (Don't shoot the
messenger; I still run my own mail server.)

Again, moderators may be different.  (They clearly are to some extent
given how few moderator submission addresses I found at Gmail, certainly
not 25%.)  So maybe something that expects something different of the
email server could work.

> I feel like moderators are somewhat beholden to keeping their software
> relatively current to be able to do their function as a moderator.

Oh, good lord, no.  This is not even remotely true.  I haven't touched the
software that I use to moderate the groups I moderate in any substantial
way since maybe 2005.

Usenet really doesn't change very much.

> I also feel like there is room to do this on a per-moderated-newsgroup
> basis.

> I don't see the need for a Usenet wide flag day.

Which brings us back to my point in the original discussion: we need some
way to know which moderators are able to receive encapsulated messages and
change how they're sent messages based on that configuration.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.