[Mailman-Users] Strange address handling

[NFN Smith]

I run an installation of Mailman 2.1.9 installed from the Debian stable branch, and includes Sendmail 8.13.8, and have discovered some quirky handling of user addresses.

On occasion, I've had users complain about sending multiple subscription request to a list's -join address, and never getting any response.  This happened last week, and with a little checking of logs, I found that what happened is that for some reason, some outbound messages addressed to individual users are getting "-owner" tagged to the username portion of the address.  Of course, because the address is invalid, the message bounces.

Thus, if I'm hosting a list whose posting address is thislist at example.com, and a user whose email address is demouser at somewhere.com, the result of sending a subscription to thislist-join at example.com generated a reply message that was addressed not to demouser at somewhere.com but demouser-owner at somewhere.com.  

This seems to be an intermittent problem.  When this particular problem happened, the user submitted subscriptions to nearly a dozen lists, only this one list had a problem -- all the other subscriptions were handled correctly.  Also, as far as I can tell, this problem seems to be not specific to subscription responses, nor to this list.  A check of my logs indicates a handful of other mis-addressed -owner addresses for regular message traffic.

Additionally, a few minutes ago. I was looking at the web interface for my own subscription options to thislist, and found in the the section for requesting a password reminder, the following text:

(Note - you are subscribing to a list of mailing lists, so the password notice will be sent to the admin address for your membership, myaddress-owner at example.com)

I've never seen that one before.  

I do happen to be the owner of this list.  I clicked the button, and the logs indicate that the message was sent to the specified address, and because it's invalid, the message bounced.

I also checked subscriptions of several other lists that I own, and none of them shows that note in the subscription options.

Any idea of what's going on?

NFN Smith




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