The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Liam Kirsher <address@concealed>]

Hi!

David Verdin wrote:
> Liam,
>
> Sorry for the late answer. We were quite in the middle of something
> and, well, sometimes time just flies.
> Sorry again.
> About your message, now.
> Yes, you have two problems, different, but they happened at the same
> time so it can be confusing. It is unlikely they are related, though.
> The first one involves your mail interface:
>
>> I stopped and restarted sympa, and initially there were two sympa.pl
>> processes (as expected) but then one of them died again, and the
>> messages
>> in ~sympa/spool/msg were still just sitting there not being processed.
>> At this point some additional files showed up in the ~sympa/spool/tmp
>> directory, and one of them also had the line quoted below about
>> "Unrecognized line... Message.pm line 89".
>>
>> I removed a bunch of spam messages from the msg directory and was able
>> to restart sympa normally, and now it's running.  So, I think that one
>> of the messages was causing a problem.
>>
>> You can check out the files here: http://www.numenet.com/sympa-err
>>
>> In ~sympa/spool/tmp I found three files:
>> 13885.stderr
>> 13886.stderr
>> sympa_dump.1181582290.23287
>>
>> The last line of 13885.stderr is:
>>  
>>> Unrecognised line: address@concealed>  at
>>> /home/sympa/bin/Message.pm line 89
>>>     
>> If you look at that msg, you can see that Amavis added
>>  
>>> BAD HEADER Non-encoded 8-bit data     
>> And I suspect that the non-encoded From line may be causing the
>> problem in
>> sympa.
>>   
> You're right. The .stderr files are created when sympa.pl crashes.
> They gather its standard output. Then the last message you find is
> certainly the cause of the crash. And it happens to be relative to the
> line 89 of Message.pm, in which we parse the From header field of the
> message.
> Anyway, to pursue further investigation, we need to see the message
> file. When we click on the link you provided, we run into a 503 error.
> Could you please correct this to let us access your files?
Woops!  Okay, take look now.  http://www.numenet.com/sympa-err
>> The dump file seems to have been created after wwwsympa received some
>> strange input.  I found this in /var/log/messages and /var/log/sympa:
>>
>> [snip/]
>>
>> Jun 11 10:18:10 pythagoras wwsympa[23287]: [robot lists.mpjc.org]
>> [client 65.88.178.10] get_parameters: syntax error for parameter list
>> value 'http:��lists..
>> mpjc.org�wws�subrequest�bulletin' not conform to regexp
>> /^[\w\-\.\+]*$/ ;
>> dumped vars in /home/sympa/spool/tmp/sympa_dump.1181582290.23287
>>
>> [snip/]
>> ------------------------
>>
>>   
> This is the second problem. In the sympa web interface, when a
> parameter doesn't comply to the expected format a dump is created
> containing the whole context to help admins understand the problem.
> Fortunately this is harmless to sympa. We can check this dump too, but
> the problems seems related to encoding : the slashes in the URL seem
> to have been replaced by the sequence "�", Was it due to copy/paste
> from an encoding to another, a faulty web client or something else?
> Only inspection of the dump could answer this question.
The dump file can be seen via the link above.  I don't know how those
characters ended up there.

>> There is quite a bit of spam arriving.  I discard the worst, but to
>> avoid
>> false positives I have to allow a somewhat lenient spam policy.  I think
>> there
>> is a way to have sympa discard spam (that is, as identified by
>> SpamAssassin
>> headers).  Can someone remind me what it is?
>>   
> There's a howto about it. Check out this web page:
> http://www.sympa.org/wiki/faq/tips_and_howto?#how_to_moderatereject_suspected_spam_messages
>
Okay.  That seems to be designed to prevent legit members from
submitting spam, right?
My problem is that spammers pick up the list addresses (and other
addresses) and send spam from random email addresses. I don't want to
moderate it or even officially reject it (since that generates a bounce,
which then usually bounces, creating lots of backscatter). I want to
silently discard messages from non-list members, or maybe quarantine it.
I'm a bit confused by the scenario syntax, and so, haven't felt too
confident about changing it.

It's the spammers that are sending the messages that crash Sympa, in
this case.  Also I don't feel like I want Sympa taking CPU cycles to
process spam when it really shouldn't have to.

>
> Regards,
>

-- 
Liam Kirsher
PGP: http://liam.numenet.com/pgp/