[Mailman-Users] Removing illegal character or duplicated user names- update

[Mark Sapiro]

Mike Maughan wrote:

>To update you on this issue, I have a user whom I managed to subscribe
>incorrectly to the list and now cannot remove her.  There appear to be two
>hidden subscriptions, neither of which appear in the subscriptions page.
>
>If I leave her normal sub active, she gets three copies of list messages; if
>I suspend mail on her (visible) account, she gets 2 copies.
>
>I have diff-ed the full messages she receives in the case of 3 copies, and
>apart from some oddments to do (I think) with MIME all emails are identical,
>which means the recipient addresses & timestamps are identical ==> all three
>emails were produce for the same recipient at the same time by the list
>manager.  BTW I've added one of the diff contents to the end of this post
>FYI.


If the files you diffed contained All the Received: headers, this might
indicat the the duplication is occurring after final smtp delivery to
her, perhaps by message rules, but that would not explain why the
number goes from 3 to 2 when you suspend delivery.


>My best understanding as of now is that I have managed (by attempting to
>subscribe with illegal characters via the mass subscribe) to create two
>hidden subscriptions which are active but unmanageable.  I can only see two
>possible ways to address this:
>1) edit the system-level data defining the subscribers - problematic as I'm
>on dreamhost and do not have sysadmin access to the underlying data


That complicates things. You may need to enlist help from dreamhost.


>2) find a way to create a pattern-match input to 'mass unsubscribe' which
>would find and remove the entries.


Mass unsubscribe doesn't accept patterns.


>Speculative scenario: if there are now three identical IDs in the underlying
>database, the system may be unable to key on these in order to do anything
>with them, but will process them sequentially when creating outgoing posts.



Unless dreamhost is using a non-standard member adaptor in their
Mailman (I think they have a standard Mailman 2.1.9 with htdig
searching added),
your speculation is not possible. The member database is a Python
dictionary keyed by lower-case email address. It is not possible to
have duplicate keys in a Python dictionary, thus it is not possible to
have two entries with the same email address.


>I have copies of the original outbound posts as received by Viv (my
>subscriber), plus my diff files, if they are of any use, but as they contain
>subscriber data I'm uncomfortable posting them public.


Do these original messages contain all the Received: headers?


>Any thoughts on how to proceed here?  Pretty please? :)
>
>- Mike
>
>Compare: (<)G:\Downloads\!in\viv hart list dupe #1.eml (4765 bytes)
>   with: (>)G:\Downloads\!in\viv hart list dupe #3.eml (4765 bytes)
>
>42c42
><     boundary="----=_NextPart_000_006E_01C76497.A8D09630"
>---
>>     boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0078_01C76497.A8D09630"


The change in boundaries indicates that these messages were 'remailed'
which in turn indicates that you may not have all the original
headers. You need to get the entire raw message source for these
messages from Viv. How she gets this depends on her MUA.

Here are some other things you can try:

On the Membership list page, enter some pattern in the 'Find member'
box that will match for sure all of her possible addresses and as few
others as possible - maybe her username or part of the domain. The
idea is to get one page of results with just a few entries so you can
see the table and the 'n members total' heading. See if the number of
entries in the table is fewer than n from 'n members total'. If so,
look at the raw html source and see if you see anything.

If you have a 'personalize' setting on your Non-digest options page,
set it to 'Yes' and add the line

This message sent to %(user_delivered_to)s.

to msg_footer. If there really are three messages being sent, this
should be different in the three messages received.

Other things will require dreamhost cooperation.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan