Developers of Sympa

[Aumont - Comite Reseaux des Universites <address@concealed>]

Jeff Abbott wrote:

> Sympa devs,
>
> We're looking at doing different things with Sympa now that we've  
> begun its deployment here at Duke, and one of those things is for  
> contact addresses to which our various servers can send mail for  
> stuff like alerts, cron jobs, etc.  The problem is, a great many of  
> those messages come from addresses which trigger the following  
> conditional in sympa.pl:
>
>     if ($sender =~ /^(mailer-daemon|sympa|listserv|mailman|majordomo| 
> smartlist|$conf_email)(\@|$)/mio) {
>         do_log('notice','Ignoring message which would cause a loop,  
> sent by %s', $sender);
>         return undef;
>     }
>
> What types of loops is this trying to prevent?  There are lots of  
> valid messages which may come from address@concealed that  
> list owners, and in our case list members, may wish to see, unless  
> I'm misunderstanding the purpose or potential failings which not  
> having this in-place would cause.  Is there a reason we couldn't make  
> this a per-list configuration option?  I can understand not looping  
> based on the X-Loop header, but what good does blocking anything from  
> mailer-daemon do?

By the past, we had a lot of malicious users that tried to start loops 
with 2 automatics mail responder echanging messages. mailer-daemon@  is 
some time aliased to some responder, that's why we did it. May be this 
is not usefull anymore. If needed we can add one more sympa.conf 
parameter with default value would be 
'mailer-daemon|sympa|listserv|mailman|majordomo|smartlist' so you can 
change it the way you want. It's really easy to do excepted that we have 
to find a name for this parameter, something like 
loop_prevention_sender_regexp

Serge

ps :  the space just in front of smartlist is a bug :-(