Re: You have been removed from
On Fri, Oct 08, 2021 at 05:33:26PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> In the meantime, if anybody else has problems from this host - it is
> appropriate to email listmaster@lists.debian.org and explain what has
> happened, including the headers and bounce email text. If they allow
> your host, they will also send an email to check that an email will
> not in fact bounce.
>
> With thanks to Steve McIntyre who has confirmed that this sort of
> thing has happened before.
I got one of the probe emails from listmaster, and I wasn't unsubscribed
afterward, so I guess they found no fault with my setup.
I'm still curious about what's actually happening here. Perhaps nobody
on this list knows, which is understandable, but if someone does
happen to know the details, I'd like to hear them.
What I know so far is that someone at ovh.net is subscribed to debian-user
and has set up an auto-responder. Every time they receive a message from
the mailing list, they generate a response message. This response message
is sent with an envelope sender (MAIL FROM) address of
postmaster@vps268904.ovh.net and the same address in the From: header.
The Postfix MTA at bendel.debian.org logs receipt of the message from
"vps268904.ovh.net (mail.data3v.com [51.254.223.75])" according to
the Received: header which it adds. The response message has the Subject:
header "**stop**".
The body of the response message begins with the email address of the
person who sent the responded-to message, in angle brackets. Then a
colon, a space, and a copy of the original Subject: header. Then a
newline, then about 128 bytes (I didn't count, just approximating) of
the original message's body, another newline, and finally the text
"Please stop the message. we have already unsubscribed our email address."
(This sentence is clearly untrue.)
Somehow, when bendel receives this response message, it treats it as a
"bounce message" from the person whose email address appears in angle
brackets at the top of the body of the response. THIS is the part that
I don't understand, and would like to know more about. How does an
email address that only appears in the body get counted as if it were
the sender? Is this a bug in the mailing list software? It sure seems
like it.
If I were to put <postmaster@vps268904.ovh.net>: at the top of the body
of this message, would it cause bendel to think that OVH had sent one
of these "bounce messages"? Or does putting it in the middle of a line
down here toward the end of the message also count? Then again, the
offender's subscribed address is probably something other than this.
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