From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ben Schmidt Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:55:35 +0000 Subject: Re: [mlmmj] undesired help emails Message-Id: <4C960847.7000102@yahoo.com.au> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: mlmmj@mlmmj.org On 19/09/10 7:25 AM, Robin H. Johnson wrote: > On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 02:27:01AM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote: >> One last thing, I still receive very often a mail from MLMMJ with in the >> subject line: "Commands available for dtcdev@gplhost.sg", telling me how >> to subscribe / unsubscribe, etc. Could it be possible that this was >> generated by some spams, as I've configured my list to have a footer >> with: "To unsubscribe, send a mail to dtcdev-unsubscribe@gplhost.sg" in >> each email? I would really like to avoid receiving this, as it has been >> annoying me for years... I haven't experienced this myself. > I think I asked about this a while ago, but didn't see any response. > The command interface mails don't include 'Precedence: bulk' or anything > else in the headers that mark them as mailing list messages, and they > often triggered by spammers with forged addresses. I get dozens of them > each day as the 'owner' for all of the @lists.gentoo.org instances. > > I've considered a patch to include control/customheaders in the bulk > mails, but I only want some of the headers. > > [...] > > Maybe a custom control/commandcustomheaders, control/commanddelheaders? I have implemented a feature which hasn't made it into hg yet as I haven't documented it properly, to allow arbitrary headers to be added to listtexts, so this would allow you to add the relevant headers. In a future Mlmmj release, I'll probably try to include more sane and standards-compliant/best-practice defaults for these, too. See http://mlmmj.org/archive/mlmmj/2010-02/1666.html Would this really help, though? I don't think I understand sufficiently what is going on to properly consider how to solve it yet. Is a spammer forging your address and sending a message to listname+help@wherever.tld? This seems unlikely. Or is Mlmmj responding to listname+anything-it-doesnt-recognise@wherever.tld with the help email, and we should have an option to turn that off and ignore such mails? Or is a spammer forging the list address and sending to listname+something@wherever.tld and thereby having a help email sent back to you as owner somehow? In short, are we able to track down more precisely what's going on? And is this perhaps something that really should be solved at the MTA level by doing more to ensure emails with forged addresses don't make it to Mlmmj at all? Anyone know if other MLMs suffer from this problem and/or what they do to attempt to solve it? Ben.