Re: Then it happened to me...
Hello,
On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 06:18:27PM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> As you can see, the address at the top of the body was not mine. Mine
> appears further down inside the body. Still inside angle brackets. I
> suspect that's relevant to whatever bug bendel is suffering from.
>
> And yeah, I'm definitely calling this a bug. How can it be anything else?
> It's parsing the BODIES of posts for email addresses in angle brackets,
> and each address found is being treated as if it had generated a "bounce".
Mailing list managers sometimes try very hard to work out if a message is a
bounce, because bounce messages have no standard format, so they do
sometimes end up treating things as bounces which aren't actually
bounces.
However, Debian's list manager uses Variable Envelope Return Path,
e.g. your mail as delivered to me used an envelope sender of
bounce-debian-user=andy=strugglers.net@lists.debian.org with my
subscribed address encoded within the local part. So it does know
that any email to
bounce-debian-user=andy=strugglers.net@lists.debian.org is a bounce
generated by a mail sent to me and doesn't have to try to parse any
of the body.
So I think you are correct that it's a bug, but in the
configuration, insofar as it's still willing to try to parse mails
that end up at debian-user@lists.debian.org. Nothing should be
bouncing mail there.
(Though note that in *this* thread we are/were discussing these GMX
bounces, which do go to the correct place, and are causing problems
only for recipients on GMX mail infrastructure.)
If you look at the nag email you got from bendel it showed that the
mail it processed was:
From: "Mail Delivery Subsystem" <postmaster@vps268904.ovh.net>
To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
I suspect that the list manager is trapping anything like "Mail
Delivery Subsystem" and/or postmaster@ to try to protect the list
from receiving a torrent of someone else's bounces.
I don't know how much unwanted email the list would get if this
behaviour were removed. Perhaps it would be best to just silently
discard such emails, since as I say nothing should be sending
bounces there.
An irritating point is that if the miscreant who's bouncing these
messages had chosen to send the bounce to the VERP address, they'd
already have unsubscribed themselves by now!
That's what I think is happening with these ovh bounces anyway!
Cheers,
Andy
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https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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