[Mailman-Users] reply-to header

Karen R McArthur kmcarthu at bates.edu
Thu Oct 16 15:33:56 CEST 2008


Thank you for your reply - at your recommendation I have changed the DNS 
to a full A record.  And now that mailman is our production list 
program, I have assigned it the "lists" host name: lists.bates.edu. 
However, I am still seeing the previous behavior as described.  When I 
have a list with "reply_to" set to "List", the reply_to address is 
<listname>@bates.edu and not <listname>@lists.bates.edu, as I would 
prefer.  I have attached headers from an example email.  Notice that 
neither the Sender and To fields have the host name in the address - but 
the X_BeenThere and List* fields do.

Karen R. McArthur <kmcarthu at bates.edu>
Systems Administrator
Information and Library Services, Bates College
Lewiston, Maine 04240 USA
ph:(207)786-8236   fax:(207)786-6057

If you find that everybody else is right and you're wrong,
it might just be that you're thinking outside the box. The
world is yet to catch up.

Brad Knowles wrote:
> Karen R McArthur wrote:
> 
>> My list server fqdn: mailman.bates.edu
>> I would like the reply-to to go to this fqdn 
>> (listname at mailman.bates.edu), but it gets stripped to listname at bates.edu
> 
> For one thing, mailman.bates.edu is a CNAME alias that points to 
> postoffice03.bates.edu, so all MTAs should be re-writing 
> mailman.bates.edu anyway -- but not to simply bates.edu.
> 
> If you don't want this kind of rewriting to be done, then you can't use 
> CNAME aliases in the DNS.  Give mailman.bates.edu an IP address (like 
> 134.181.130.141), and then set up reverse DNS for this IP address so 
> that mailman.bates.edu is one of the answers given.  It should be okay 
> if postoffice03.bates.edu also points directly to the same IP address 
> and the reverse DNS for that IP address also includes that name in the 
> response, but you need a full forward->reverse->forward matching for any 
> given name you're going to use.
> 
> Also, I would suggest using a service name that does not include the 
> name of the software in question.  So, lists.bates.edu instead of 
> mailman.bates.edu -- this gives you the option to change the software 
> used in the future, instead of having a case where you have Mailman 
> serving mailing lists on a machine known as listproc.bates.edu, or 
> whatever.  This is generally a good idea for pretty much all services, 
> so bugs.bates.edu instead of bugzilla.bates.edu, webmail.bates.edu 
> instead of squirrelmail.bates.edu, mail.bates.edu instead of 
> delivermail.bates.edu, www.bates.edu instead of tomcat.bates.edu, etc....
> 
>> As far as I can tell, sendmail is not rewriting my headers.  I have 
>> tested sending email through the sendmail CLI and the entire header 
>> arrives as sent.
> 
> Keep in mind that some configuration options will only be effective at 
> list creation time.  Once the list gets created, even if you go in and 
> change those options, you will only affect new lists that get created 
> and all existing lists will be unchanged.
> 
> So, make sure you're changing the right option, and that the option in 
> question for a list is something that can be changed after the list has 
> been created.
> 


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