[Mailman-Developers] Sender field

James Ralston qralston+ml.mailman-developers at andrew.cmu.edu
Mon May 1 23:09:09 CEST 2006


On 2006-04-28 at 19:54-04 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 17:32 -0400, James Ralston wrote:
> 
> > I would argue that the best course of action is to excise Sender
> > header rewriting entirely and provide no option to turn it on.
> > (Mailman has way too many options already.)
> 
> I agree that this is what we should hope for.  Our data supporting
> the rewriting of Sender is many years out of date, so we need to
> gather more data.  Who's brave enough to try it?  :)

We're going to implement it, because we really don't have any choice.
:/

At our site, we have around 550 lists and 15,700 subscribers in total.
We process (send) around 16,708 messages per day.  Our list owners
have discovered that a non-trivial number of the recipients on our
lists have mail clients that include the Sender address in the
reply-to-all feature.  As a result, we have a continual stream of
subscribers who are accidentally hosing their subscriptions (causing
them to be suspended or removed) by accidentally replying to Mailman's
bounce processing address in the Sender header.

This problem is so bad for us that some list owners are demanding that
we abandon Mailman in favor of some other list manager.  (They're also
incensed about Mailman's bounce processing options, but that's another
topic.)

Since disabling the Sender header processing is literally a one-line
patch, we're going to go ahead and do it.  If it breaks horribly (even
for a small percentage of users) we'll know; if it makes our users
happy, we'll know that too.

James



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