[Mailman-Developers] Reasons why personalization of the To/From are a bad idea...

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:10:30 -0800 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

> Having run with the personalization for a while (and only now getting
> around to updating to CVS so I can turn off the header mods), I have
> three reasons why doing the to/from personalization turn out to be a
> bad idea.. FYI.

I'd narrow that statement to: "...a Bad Idea for discussion lists."  It
would seem to remain useful for announcement and marketing list.

> 1) One of my lists has been hit badly by a couple of subscribers with
> the Klez virus that evidently didn't know it and weren't fixing their
> machines. I finally posted a note to the list telling everyone to
> check their frigging machines and to run anti-virus software, because
> if I had to track down the sites sending the viruses to the list,
> those sites would be banned (FWIW, I did end up putting IP blocks
> against two sites, which stopped most of the noise).

FWVLIW I avoid the problem (and the moderation/list load) by stripping
those MIME parts and then silently discarding messages which are too
short after stripping (ie nothing left after offensive payload removed).
Very little gets past that.

Another approach of course is to front your list with a virus stripper.

> 3) I can't prove this, but... Since I went to To/From header
> personalization, I've started getting complaints about mail not
> getting to AOL users. 

Yeah, this is not terribly surprising.  I suspect you're running afoul
of their SPAM filters and Mailman's new header personalisation is
hitting a corner case in their dupe filters (personally addressed now
being common).

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.