The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Chris Hastie <address@concealed>]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Aumont - Comite Reseaux des Universites 
<address@concealed> wrote
> > It would be great if it could use a unique To: line, because
> > now that we've customized the Subject: line on confirmation
> > requests to make them more user-friendly, they can easily become
> > so long that some email clients truncate the authorization code at the 
> > end of the Subject: line.  Sympa then tries to parse a broken command 
> > and doesn't know what to do with it.
> I am afraid making VERP for confirmation could brake the confirmation 
> process because of many kind of automatic reply that could make 
> unwanted validation. It is exactly why we use VERP for the welcome 
> message : any automatic answer to the welcome message push the new 
> subscriber out of the list.

I'm not sure about 'any' automatic answers. I see plenty that aren't 
sent to the SMTP reverse path (including a good few sent to the Reply-To 
header, which if you're not careful can cause havoc on lists).

> May be you could try to use In-Reply-To: based on message-id ? The 
> first think to do is to collect many automatic answers and check if 
> they contain this header. If not, tell us we will introduce this.

Again, I see auto-responses that do contain In-Reply-To: headers. The 
one thing you can be sure about auto-responses is that they're all 
slightly different! Some even include the trigger message's subject, 
getting around the current method of preventing them from authorising.

My current efforts to exclude them from lists include redirecting 
anything with null reverse path to the moderator (done outside of sympa 
currently) and this in include.send.header

match ([header->precedence], /list|bulk/)      smtp,smime,md5    -> 
reject,quiet
match ([header->subject], /auto( |-)+respon(se|der)/)                            
       smtp,smime,md5   -> editorkey,quiet
match ([header->subject], /out of (the )+office/)                                
       smtp,smime,md5   -> editorkey,quiet
match ([header->subject], /auto( |-)+reply/)                                    
smtp,smime,md5   -> editorkey,quiet
match ([header->subject], /(vacation|holiday)/)                                 
smtp,smime,md5   -> editorkey,quiet

and still they get through :(
--
Chris Hastie