grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) (08/05/89)
It appears that there a number of sites gatewaying the comp.unix.ultrix
newsgroup into mailing lists. This is fine, however some of them are
not taking adequate precautions about either errors or out of date
information in their redistribution lists.
This results in a number of problems:
1) the poster of the article receives "error messages" about mail delivery
to some random site in the universe. He donsn't care and can't do
anything about it.
2) articles with bad addresses or otherwise mangled header information
loop in the redistibution lists or back into the newsgroup resulting
in (sometimes multiply) duplicated postings.
If you run such a gateway, please make sure that when you forward the
usenet articles, that the headers are improved such that errors are
returned to the postmaster or list maintainer at the forwarding site
and not to the original poster or the list itself.
I don't claim to be an expert in network mailers, however the following
are probably adequate to cover most cases:
1) Delete the "From:" header line and replace it with one like:
"From: ultrix-list-errors@gateway.site" or some other alias for the
list maintainer or a data sink. The "Reply-To:" header contains the
information needed for _people_ to send mail to to original poster.
2) Add the unofficial, but often effective "Errors-To:" header line,
with the same sort of information.
3) Try not mess with the original "Message-Id:" header since this
prevents duplication if the article re-enters the usenet news
system. This may or may not be possible depending on your mailer.
The bad guys recently have been:
decuac / info-ultrix-fwd - sending back messages about non-existant
users and systems.
carleton.ca / ca.gateway - sending back messsages about network
congestion and such problems.
eurokom? - shows up the "Message-Id:" of one very mangled article
that is apparently looping in some of the distribution
lists or at least being (mis)delivered multiple times.
I will attempt to copy this to the postmasters at decuac and carleton.ca,
however there is nothing I can do about the looping article, hopefully it
will vanish of it's own accord sooner or later.
As usual, comments about or corrections to this posting are appreciated...
--
George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@uunet.uu.net
Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)steve@fnord.umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller) (08/14/89)
If you're trying to hack headers to make sure that mail/news bounces go back where they belong, I'd suggest using the RFC 822 Sender: line rather than Errors-To:. The former is standard, while the latter is not. The former works pretty well, too; on a large (> 500 users) mailing list I run, on which I put a Sender: line in the header, submitters usually don't see any bounces. Hacking the From: line may or may not be worth it. I don't, but that's just me. If you want a copy of the software I use to hack headers on mailing lists, anonymous FTP out to fnord.umiacs.umd.edu (128.8.120.3, for those living in the host-table-based past), and grab pub/distribute.tar. A compressed version is also available. -Steve Spoken: Steve Miller Domain: steve@mimsy.umd.edu UUCP: uunet!mimsy!steve Phone: +1-301-454-1808 USPS: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) (08/19/89)
In article <19062@mimsy.UUCP> steve@umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller) writes: > > If you're trying to hack headers to make sure that mail/news bounces go > back where they belong, I'd suggest using the RFC 822 Sender: line rather > than Errors-To:. The former is standard, while the latter is not. The > former works pretty well, too; on a large (> 500 users) mailing list I run, > on which I put a Sender: line in the header, submitters usually don't see > any bounces. > > Hacking the From: line may or may not be worth it. I don't, but that's > just me. I don't have any real problem with your comments, however there is some question about which header lines survive gateways into VMS mailer(s). I know the From: line makes it 8-). The Sender: stuff makes sense, however looking briefly at RFC822 didn't really reveal much about the semantics - whether it would serve to redirect error messages or whether it served mostly as a comment entry. I dug around a bit in sendmail and mostly ended up with a headache. Happily, the problems seem to have gone away for the moment! -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@uunet.uu.net Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)