[Mailman-Users] sender/envelope addresses esp with mailed commands

Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham at vdata.co.uk
Mon Jul 12 13:47:29 CEST 1999


I tried experimenting with the mail command interface to MailMan with 
total lack of success until I discovered some oddities regarding the 
detection of sender addresses.

I am using Mailman 1.0rc3 (same result with 1.0rc2).  I have the 
default zero setting for USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER.  The MUA I am using on 
the test account is Netscape running on Linux connecting through an ISP 
by POP/SMTP.  Netscape appears to add a "Sender: nigel" header  - ie my 
unqualified user name, which is not qualified by any of the MTAs on the 
way (basically none of the MTAs will have sufficient information to 
qualify it so they shouldn't be playing with it).

Commands sent to the list-request address are responded to by mailman, 
which helpfully (!) sends replies to "nigel" on the list machine and 
complains during subscribe operations about an unqualified email 
address.

Fixing up the sender header is not really an option - it impacts to 
many other peoples systems.

I tried just stripping the sender header (assuming that would cause a 
drop back to From: headers as is implied in the FAQ etc), and managed 
to completely break list posting :-(

So I guess that Mailman, to be safe, should check the sender address 
more carefully - specifically if it is not qualified then it should 
discard it and use the From:  or envelope (maybe Return-Path:) address 
in its place.

	Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham                  Nigel.Metheringham at VData.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]






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