On Sun, 15 Sep 2002, Eric Thomas wrote:

> I am trying to address all the comments made under this thread in a
> single message. I am also trying to address the issues rather than
> answer individual inflammatory comments, so I have purposefully chosen
> not to attribute the text I am quoting.

I apologize if I came across in an inflamatory way... not meant to be so.

> This would be a bug - please send more information and it will be fixed.
> This being said, I do not quite understand how it is happening, and in
> particular why it would be new in 1.8e. First, complying MTAs send the
> bounce to owner-xxx, not to the list. Second, bounces in standard format
> are identified and immediately processed as such. Bounces in
> non-standard format sent erroneously to the list have always been sent
> to the list when they could not be identified as bounces through the
> built-in heuristics - this is not new in 1.8e and is in fact inherent to
> the difficulty of identifying every possible type of non-standard
> bounce. Again, I need to see an example in order to give a better
> answer.

I though I'd reported this and sent in samples to support right after 1.8e
came out.  I'll see what I can get to support tomorrow.

Basic recap -- the bounce message comes into the owner-list address, but
it contains a MIME attachment that has the entire original message as sent
to the list -- this is forwarded out to the list address again as if it
were sent by the original author of the message that bounced. It was
fairly confusing when it first happened, and it may be triggered by a
problem with the bounce headers in Notes. For some reason, some notes MTAs
put two From: headers in the bounce messages... the first is from the
"postmaster" address and the second is from the original sender of the
message to the list.

Here's a sample from today's log of one that was caught:

15 Sep 2002 12:17:09 From [log in to unmask]: X-ADMMAIL
owner-listname [log in to unmask]
15 Sep 2002 12:17:09 Processing file 12038 from [log in to unmask]
(LSV82I) <W> FROM field duplicated. Last occurrence was retained.
15 Sep 2002 12:17:09 -> Discarded by content filter rule
15 Sep 2002 12:17:09 -> Comment: Bad delivery message loops are rejected.

The bounce message comes in (first line) with a MIME header that reads:

Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status;

The first MIME body is the rejection message in plain text for the end
user to read with "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii"

The second is the  "Content-Type: message/delivery-status" body with
standard format.

The third is the entire original message with all headers as it was sent
from the list with "Content-Type: message/rfc822".

What were're seeing by watching the Sendmail debug log is the email coming
into the owner-* address, that being piped to:

        lsv_amin -t owner-listname

and then that message is sent back out by the LISTSERV to the list
address:

        lsv_amin -t listname


I'll create a test list with no one on it but a bad address so I can
capture it all together. So much flows out at once on the larger lists
that it's hard to track down what's happening.

> 18E-0004 02/06/01 [B] Mail to LISTSERV w/o CRLF before MIME boundary rejected
>
> You can get the fix via the normal support channels.

Great news. I'll contact support when I get back to work. Thanks for your
help.

-- DCP


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