[Mailman-Developers] Re: Cutting "Received:" headers (John A. Martin)

[Barry Warsaw]

On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 12:57, Tom Neff wrote:

> The purpose of the Received: trace field is to allow a mail administrator to
> identify and, if necessary, troubleshoot the relay path that a message
> followed before reaching his or her site (which might not even be the
> intended destination, mail problems being what they are).  The case can be
> made that once a message has successfully arrived at the listserv/Mailman
> collector, this information is of no further use and may as well be dropped.
> (In that case, listmembers would still have Received: headers in their list
> messages, but only from the path between the posting host and their own
> machines.)

The other case can be made that retaining Received headers has very
practical benefits.  For example, it occasionally happens that a piece
spam sneaks through our filters (I /know/!  Imagine that. ;).  Then
python.org gets blamed for spamming people.  Having the Received headers
in there has so far proved that the spam did not originate from us.

> I would be in favor of a "clean_headers" per-list option which, if True,
> would remove all but a minimal, rational set of headers from messages before
> they are reposted.

Which headers should be removed?  I guess you'd need a general mechanism
to clean out any header.  Personally, I don't think the Received headers
are any problem.

> In the meantime, any site admin who wants to do this kind of cleaning can
> easily insert "formail" or "reformail" into the alias pipeline for the
> posting address.  These are utilities supplied with "procmail" and "maildrop"
> respectively, and widely available on the Net.

And of course, it would be easy to edit Cleanse.py or add a new, fancier
handler module in the standard Mailman pipeline to get rid of these
headers.

-Barry