On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 14:31:17 +1100, Michael Shannon <[log in to unmask]>  said:
> In our own organisation I've cut out the internal MX and made LISTSERV
> communicate directly with the external relay machine, making a savings of 2
> or 3 hops in the process.  Is there anything else I can do?  Is there some
> way of configuring LISTSERV so it can trim out any excessive SMTP header
> info before it resends back to the list?

No.

Thou Shalt Not Remove Received: headers.

They're there for a reason.

> The worst offenders appear to be government departments who sit behind large
> enterprise gateways.  I've seen some mail that gets passed around like a
> football, up to 9 or 10 times, before it even gets to see the Internet.
> Unfortunately, it's also these same departments that seem to have the
> strictest rules regarding hop counts.

If they're going to play SMTP Football, and run sendmail, they need to
put the following in their sendmail.mc files:

define(`confMAX_HOP', `32')dnl

or even higher.  If they can't figure out how, or can't be bothered, your
best defence is a small shell script that does this:

##!/bin/sh
echo "Removing user $1 from all lists due to mailer idiocy"
lcmd quiet del "*" $1
mail -s "Your removal from our lists" $1 < canned.maxhops
exit 0

and put some useful text in canned.maxhops. ;)

/Valdis (who used to be liberal in what he accepts, conservative in what he
generates, but has gotten trigger-happy in his old age ;)