Re: Hosting a FUDforum on lilypond.org

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Montag, dem 02.08.2021 um 14:25 +0200 schrieb Jean Abou Samra:
> I started searching for alternatives, and didn't find many.
> In fact exactly one, called FUDforum -- Fast Uncompromising
> Discussions, and not Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt! Its main
> page is itself a FUDforum, [11], and the documentation is
> at [12].
> 
> I was able to install it on a local Apache server. In my
> experiments, I encountered some issues when trying to post to
> the lists via it [13], but only with one SMTP server; another
> was fine. The rest of the functionality worked correctly. Thus,
> FUDforum appears to be a potential solution. And I do not see
> other solutions currently. I therefore propose to try it out
> for real.

Let me try to understand what the intended setup is:
1. FUDforum imports all messages sent to the mailing list
2. After login, it allows to send messages to the mailing list *in the
name of the user*.

Now, the forum doesn't have credentials for the user's SMTP server
(does it?), so it needs to fake the "From: " header when sending via
its own server. This goes against all good practice currently being
implemented in the world of mail servers because it's essentially the
same technique that spammers use to impersonate addresses. So if both
the user's and the receiver's mail server are correctly configured,
such messages are either discarded immediately or will at least be
marked as spam with a high probability.

The first point is essentially covered by the "official" mailing list
archives. So my ignorant question would be: If users really want a web
interface to read and reply to the mailing list, wouldn't it be better
to just use the webmailer of their choice?

Jonas

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part