[Mailman-Users] Option to suppress senders' email addresses?

Richard Barrett r.barrett at openinfo.co.uk
Sun Sep 26 21:36:06 CEST 2004


My 2 cents.

This thread smacks of trying to adapt Mailman to be an anonymising  
remailer and I am not sure that is a suitable objective.

Brad is right in saying that suppressing all information alluding to  
the originator of a posting requires gutting the message of a fair  
number of headers of value in dealing with mail problems. Not just  
From: and Received: but Message-id: and others have to go.

As regards spammers acquiring email addresses to target, list archives  
are probably a bigger target. A while back (MM 2.1.3) I took a punt at  
some fairly aggressive measures to limit harvesting of email addresses  
from Mailman list archives. The patch works but I have no idea if any  
people found it of interest. See:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/? 
func=detail&aid=850805&group_id=103&atid=300103

On 26 Sep 2004, at 19:33, Brad Knowles wrote:

> At 7:30 PM +0200 2004-09-26, Brad Knowles quoted Mark Sapiro:
>
>>>   The more I think of this though, the more I think it would be
>>>   appropriate for Mailman to drop the incoming Received: headers from
>>>   posts to an anonymous list. Why preserve the trace of how a post  
>>> got
>>>   from source to list when you want to make the source anonymous?
>>
>>  	This makes it much more difficult to debug certain types of mail
>>  problems, including bounces and multiple deliveries of the same
>>  message, etc....
>
> 	Besides, you have to sanitize more than just the "Received:" headers.  
>  All sorts of other headers might also expose personal information.   
> You'd have to sanitize all headers, and copy over only the message  
> body and subject lines.
>
> -- 
> Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>
>
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
> temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
>
>     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
>     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
>
>   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.




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