[Mailman-Users] Finding list user in redacted FBL reports

[Scott Neader]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 7:24 AM David Gibbs via Mailman-Users <
mailman-users at python.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 11:40 PM Scott Neader <scott at qth.com> wrote:
> > Do any of you have any ideas for me to identify this serial
> > 'mark-as-spammer'?  Could I hack something together temporarily that
> would
> > put maybe the first few characters of their email in the footer? (so that
> > Comcast won't sense it as an email and won't redact it?)  Other ideas?
>
> Check out the RCPT_BASE64_HEADER_NAME setting in Defaults.py.  That
> will let you tag personalized & verped deliveries with the base64
> encoding of the recipient's email address.


I want to send a BIG thanks to David Gibbs on this one.  This actually
worked perfectly!  The body of the FBL report shows just the basic To,
From, Subject, Date/Time and Body, so I did not think adding a new header
would do diddly-squat.  I *wrongly* assumed that the FBL reports do not
include any header information.  David and I traded some direct emails on
the topic and he finally convinced me to do a "View Original" or "View
Source" (depending on your email client) on the FBL report from Comcast and
low and behold... the full headers are exposed... not only from the FBL
itself, but *also* from the original offending message that the ISP
forwarded in the FBL.  So, you have two sets of headers to scroll
through... but, sure enough, my new header was there, exposing the culprit
list subscriber that was flagging all emails as spam.

Here's a step-by-step (not hard) to get this going:

1) At the server level, Personalization or VERP must be enabled. I chose
Personalization since I already had it enabled.  This is done by adding
"OWNERS_CAN_ENABLE_PERSONALIZATION = Yes" to mm_cfg.py
2) At the list level, Personalization needs to be set to Yes (Non-Digest
options > Personalize)
3) At the server level, add " RCPT_BASE64_HEADER_NAME = 'X-Mailman-R-Data'
" to mm_cfg.py

This will add a new header to each email, like this:

X-Mailman-R-Data: Ym9ndXNzcGFtcmVwb3J0ZXJAY29tY2FzdC5uZXQ=
>

 My next goal is to try VERP, and see if I can use that to find the
habitual "mark as spam" folks on some Digest emails. Personalization
doesn't work for Digests, but maybe VERP will?

Again, thanks David Gibbs for sticking with me on this!!

- Scott