The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Silvers, Tim" <address@concealed>]

Hi. We recently experienced a Sympa service crash due to receiving a bad message. It appears to have been generated by from iPhone by a user initiating Apple’s safe unsubscribe feature, as indicated by the header and the body content [1].

 

The email was removed from the spool and Sympa was able to be started. Before removing the email, Sympa would simply silently fail to start, but there were errors in the logs (see attached) and in the journalctl output. It was just odd that SystemD in our CentOS 7 install didn’t indicate a failure.

 

Anyway, I am providing these details because these “safe unsubscribe” features are more pervasive now in many clients and I wonder if others have experienced any issues due to these unsubscribe requests, and whether this is something Sympa can address? It’s probably more of a fault of the clients sending these and hitting mailing list services that handle unsubscribe requests differently, so more of a client issue than a Sympa issue. But I honestly don’t know why this message would crash Sympa. I will say that I can open the email in Apple’s Mail client on my Mac, but Outlook crashes each time I try to open it. Also, the email was sent to the service address with no command. I thought Apple’s client might have attempted to send to the listname-unsubscribe@domain address to request removal, as it is in the headers of emails sent from Sympa, but alas, it did not.

 

An interesting issue, for sure.

 

[1] X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (19C63)

 

Apple Mail sent this email to unsubscribe from the message =E2=80=9CFresh Eg=

gs for Sale=E2=80=9D.=

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