[Mailman-Users] Spam to "mailmain" list oddity

[Mark Sapiro]

Bill Moseley wrote:

>Mailman version 2.1.8
>
>I administer mailman on a few domains, and on one I receive a lot of
>spam seemingly sent to the mailman@ list.  I can work on my spam
>filters, but I'm trying to understand the path the mail is taking
>through mailman.
>
>The mailman@ list has only me as the admin and NO members.


Then posts to the list won't be delivered to anyone.


>I have just a handful of lists on this machine: users@, dev@, svn@,
>etc.
>
>When mail is sent to mailman@ I get a message with the following
>headers:
>
>    Return-path: mailman-bounces@
>    Envelope-to: <my email address>
>    X-Original-To: mailman@
>    Delivered-To: users-owner@
>
>The body of the message is simply the sender's body only -- it's not a
>mailman-generated message (e.g. approval message).
>
>In my sender filters I have:
>
>    generic_nonmember_action: hold
>
>
>My question is why is mail to mailmain@ seemingly getting delivered to
>users-owner@?


My first guess, assuming you've verified the above by actually sending
your own message to mailman at ..., is that your MTA aliases or whatever
are piping mail sent to mailman at ... to

"/path/to/mail/mailman owner users"

instead of

"/path/to/mail/mailman post mailman"



>Another thing I'm finding curious:  I have RFC2369 headers enabled on
>all lists (including the "mailman" site list).  And indeed messages on
>the other (e.g. users@) lists include these headers.  But mail sent to
>mailman@ does not include these headers.  Why is that?  Because
>List-Post, List-Subscribe, etc. have no uses for the mailman list?


The List-* headers are included in mail actually delivered from the
mailman list unless the list attribute include_rfc2369_headers is set
to No as is also the case for other lists. So if
include_rfc2369_headers is set to Yes for the mailman list, this is
additional evidence that the mail is not coming from the list.

What do you see in Mailman's 'post' and 'smtp' logs for one of these
messages?

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