Hi -
The University of Arizona’s IT department ‘upgraded’ their email system.
It rejected an email from rubin-data-academy-2024-bounces@lists.lsst.org as a DMARC Reject. I’m concerned that I won’t receive emails from lsst.org , especially because I plan on attending the data academy on Monday.
Our department IT person wrote:
"Email from totally legitimate organizations, but with servers without valid SPF records, ends up in your Mimecast Rejection folder, without the possibility to retrieve it. "
If someone from the university reads my email to them, they may be able to whitelist lsst.org as a stopgap measure.
Do you have a personal account, Melissa? I can send the e-mail to you directly. Greg (for the organizers)
Oh, I see that you were able to email my university address from your individual email account. Thank you!
The problem (which is a general one and won’t be fixed until Rubin changes or reconfigures its mailing list software to a more modern one) is typically that someone is forwarding a mail through the lsst.org mailing lists.
So for example someone from noirlab.edu (which sets the needed headers) sends to a lsst.org mailing list. Most large universities etc will reject the mail because the mailman software can’t work with the headers properly needed for modern spam rejection to make sure it is coming from where it says it is. It says it is coming from noirlab, but as far as your university is concerned, it is coming from lsst.org. You can read a bit more about it here:
https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DMARC
I’ve reported this before to Rubin IT and noirlab etc and as far as I can tell there is no plan to change it. Whitelisting lsst.org in your normal spam filter won’t help as DMARC is pulled out earlier. If your university is using proofpoint you can probably find the message in their quarantine page.
Duke actually agreed to make a special exception just for those of us in Chile and let all lsst.org mail pass through since we get safety/weather related mails about summit operations this way. Other labs (like SLAC) I think may have also added them to exceptions (or aren’t paying attention to DMARC). This was a general problem in lots of places a few years ago but a lot of people have migrated their mailing list software etc and lsst.org lists are the only ones I have problems with. Hope that info helps you a bit.
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Chris, thank you for the additional information.
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I just sent myself an email from my lsst.org address to my arizona.edu address and it worked fine. Was the email that didn’t work from an lsst.org mailing list?
Things should work fine from an LSST email address to the mailing list. The problem is when a non LSST address (that uses DMARC) sends to a LSST mailing list. Direct emails should also work fine.
In my case, I see this with emails from noirlab.edu.
Yeah, it’s really just messages coming from the lists.lsst.org mailing lists that are sometimes getting blocked. And even then, it seems to depend on the sender (i.e., it’s not always getting blocked).