Subject: [Re: regarding IETF lists using mailman: nodupes considered harmful]

From: Peter Dambier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 10:33:59 +0200

Hi Jeroen,

I forwared your message - not replying to show your headder:

From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
To: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]

So you had sent to [email-masked].
[email-masked] received only a copy. Some people might have got nothing.

My own Mozilla/Thunderbird behaves the same way:

I would have had to manually change to/cc for all recipients.

That is what we all need to do now if I got it correctly.

Regards
Peter and Karin

-------- Original Message --------
(CEST)
From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
To: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Organization: Unfix
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 09:14:55 +0200
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: regarding IETF lists using mailman: nodupes considered harmful
Sender: [email-masked]

On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 18:20 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
<SNIP>

> Specifics:  Mailman has a per-recipient setting called "nodupes".  The
> effect of this setting is that any recipient address that has the
> nodupes flag set, and which appears in a To or CC field of a message
> sent to the list, will not receive a copy of the message from the
> list.

But they _should_ be getting the message directly already, because of
the CC: or To:. Or is there something which causes the person not to get
it?

Indeed when some 'malicious' person would add Cc's/To's and would
instruct his SMTP to not forward to the additional addresses in the
Cc/To the users will effectively not receive the message.

Or when the recipient doesn't accept messages to [email-masked] +
himself, and expects everything to come from the list directly.

But how exactly does this cause a problem?

Greets,
  Jeroen

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[email-masked]
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---

From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 11:14:59 +0200

> To: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

<offtopic title="what actually happens with mailman">

Which causes my mailer to forward to purgatory.unfix.org, which I use as
my outbound mail box and instructs it to send it to:

Aug 26 09:15:07 purgatory postfix/smtp[27087]: 7A73D7FAD:
to=<[email-masked]>, relay=smtp.cs.utk.edu[160.36.56.220], delay=8,
status=sent (250 Ok: queued as 7FC99273B5)
Aug 26 09:15:39 purgatory postfix/smtp[27088]: 7A73D7FAD:
to=<[email-masked]>, relay=ietf-mx.ietf.org[132.151.6.1], delay=40,
status=sent (250 OK id=1E8YRo-0002xE-QX)

Thus the list gets it, and thus everybody who is subscribed.
Keith might get it *twice*:
- The first directly from my SMTP box to his
- The second from mailman, unless he activated the nodupes option.

But as the lists have nodupes enabled per default, he most likely gets
it ones, only from me.

Thus if I was very mean and I hated Keith (is that possible? :), I could
have simply nullrouted his SMTP, or instructed my mailer to ignore the
cc's, indeed, Keith would not have received the message from me, and
when he would have turned off the nodupes option, which is enabled per
default, would not have received it from the list either. But as I like
arguments I refuse to do something silly like that, there might be
people who do though for whatever reason.

Reading material: RFC2821 + RFC2822 and most likely quite some others.

</offtopic>

> [email-masked] received only a copy. Some people might have got

Which people? The only person who might not have received anything is
Keith, and only if I would sabotage it forcefully, see above, or some
disaster occured somewhere.

> That is what we all need to do now if I got it correctly.

Correctly understanding the workings of SMTP or something else?

Greets,
 Jeroen

PS: Before you ask, you get this message:

if (mailman->nodupes==active && jeroen->isevil()) amount=0;
else if (mailman->nodupes==active && !jeroen->isevil()) amount=1;
else if (mailman->nodupes==disabled && jeroen->isevil()) amount=1;
else if (mailman->nodupes==disabled && !jeroen->isevil()) amount=2;

Where jeroen->isevil, could mean that a SMTP box between me and you
filters the message out, maybe even a spamfilter could cause that.
But the same could happen between the ietf mailservers and you...
One simply can't be sure that a message gets delivered.

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 17:49:45 +0200

> That is what we all need to do now if I got it correctly.

No, what needs to happen if we collectively decide we don't want the  
current behavior is that the mailinglist software sets a "reply-to"  
header, so when you hit "reply" or "group reply" your reply is sent  
with the list in the "To:" field and nothing else. This used to work  
well, not sure if modern clients handle this correctly, though. Try  
to reply to this message to see what happens.

(BTW I got so fed up with receiving endless CCs for each discussion  
thread I've ever posted to (you can actually manually remove those,  
people!) that I now have procmail remove all messages with duplicate  
msgids.)

Iljitsch

---

From: Peter Dambier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:44:18 +0200

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> well, not sure if modern clients handle this correctly, though. Try  to 
> reply to this message to see what happens.

Great, it works!

> people!) that I now have procmail remove all messages with duplicate  

Makes things a lot easier.

Regards,
Peter

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:46:03 -0400

I really hate lists with "reply-to" pointing to the list.
I know when I want to reply to the list, and when I want to reply 
individually to the sender.  When reply-to points to the list, it is 
extremely difficult with most mailers to send a reply to the originator.

Yours,
Joel

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 08:16:28 +0200

> I really hate lists with "reply-to" pointing to the list.

Me too, even if it's done correctly by the author, not some
list software trying to be smart.

> I know when I want to reply to the list, and when I want
> to reply individually to the sender.

Dito, reading almost all lists behind a mail2news gateway I
get "reply to list" with Re:News, courtesy copy for those
who want it with Re:All, and private mail with Re:Mail.

That's what I expected until I met someone setting Reply-To
list manually...

...very embarrassing, of course I did NOT want the Re:Mail
"off list" on the list.

> When reply-to points to the list, it is extremely difficult
> with most mailers to send a reply to the originator.

My "astonishment factor" was worse than the small difficulty
to copy and paste From when I know that I have to be careful.

That's an old issue discussed on the 822 list many times. :-(

                              Bye, Frank