Yahoo! can bite my Shiny! Metal! Ass!

[solarbird]

Yahoo! broke all the mailing lists in the world. The traditional kind, anyway. Not so much announcement-only lists, but the discussion kind.

Basically, as a result of their changes, Yahoo! people can’t send mail to mailing lists and have it delivered to other Yahoo! addresses. Or Google addresses (tho’ I read conflicting things about that and haven’t tested), or AOL addresses (definitely), and probably a couple of others. Technical details are at Computer World.

And they’re sticking to their goddamn guns. It’s been like this since April.

There’s a patch to mailman, the software which powers our mailing lists, to work around this. It also sticks the sender’s From: address into the Reply-To: field, adding it to whatever else might be there, and you can’t turn that off. So all replies to any message on discussion lists get doubled to the original sender. That’s idiotic.

I’ve written local mods to our mailman installation – thank you, open source – to stop this. And to change the From: line so that it contains a recoverable version of the sender’s email address. So if you had mail from, say:

From: Derpy Herfy <badideas@yahoo.com>

It now gets changed to:

From: Derpy Herfy [badideas at yahoo.com] via My Mailing List <mylist@mylisthost.com>

…and it doesn’t get added to the Reply-To: field, so that doesn’t get broken.

I fought like a rabid dog to stop Microsoft SMTP engines from treating email addresses like this. It was a multi-year fight. I won, in part, because it was someone had a wrong idea about what was good behaviour.

Now I’m doing what I fought against then, because it’s the only way to get the mail through.

I hate you so much right now, Yahoo! – you are BREAKING THE GODDAMN INTERNET, and you’re doing it in ways I kept Microsoft from doing.

There are not enough punchings in the world.

eta: the code changes are trivial. Take ‘em if you want ‘em. Note the source version information at top!

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