[Mailman-Developers] What happened?

[Harald Meland]

[Hermann Benedek]

> The list received a lot of messages like this:

[...]

> Received: from MAILQUEUE by UZEM_1 (Mercury 1.21); 9 Feb 99 10:20:35 GMT+1
> From: "Cseh Miklos" <CSEHMI@uzem.radio.hu>

As I couldn't find any hints in the original message that should have
spurred any DSN (Delivery Status Notification), are you sure it's not
the guys sending the replies that are at fault?

I have on occasion encountered mail setups/clients that send me
"delivery status notification" _regardless_ of whether I want it or
not (and I don't :).  Sometimes this is something that users have
turned on themselves, and sometimes it's turned on for all users by
the local admin (presumably because "it sounded neat").

What suprises me, though, is that the notifications are sent to the
_list_ address, which only appeared in the "To:" header of the
original message.  Granted, I would not at all be surprised if such
broken setups _also_ didn't care whether or not Reply-To: was set
(which it apparently doesn't)... but sending delivery notification to
the To: address?  That's a new one to me.

BTW, I thought DSN was something that was propagated through optional
flags to certain SMTP commands, and not in the message (body or
headers) itself -- cf RFC1891.  Thus Mailman would essentially strip
any DSN requests from a message before delivering a copy of it to the
list members (because the envelope of the Mailman-originating message
is _completely_ new, and not influenced by the original envelope in
any way).

> What is this? I'm filtering the "RCPT:" e-mails now....

If I'm guessing right, you'll either have to do some pretty aggressive
filtering, or convince those of your members who send "I have now read
your mail" messages to *stop* doing so (or at least don't send them to
the To: header address).

If none of these "solutions" work, there is one final (and very
tempting, if I may say so :) option: Simply unsubscribe the offending
members until they learn to behave.

Good luck,
-- 
Harald