quattro list mail header oddities

[Brett Dikeman]

I cc'd the main list because this is important info that people 
should read- when I get the FOM fixed, I'll add it to the help 
section.

At 5:09 PM -0500 12/10/03, Chris Newbold wrote:

>Ever since the cut-over to the new server, I've noticed some oddities in
>the headers for list mail. I've got a filter that moves mail with a
>Sender: that looks like quattro-bounce at audifans.com into a seperate
>folder. Not long after the volume picked up again, I started receiving
>occasional messages with a Sender: of
>quattro-bounces+chris=newbold.org at audifans.com. I noticed these as they
>slipped by the original filter I'd written.
>
>What are these and are they expected?

It's called VGER. It's a system to guarantee that a bounce makes it 
back to the server AND the server can figure out who the bounce came 
from.

If you have:

joe at a.com ---> forwarding ---> joe at b.com

...and b.com has a problem(quota, he gets deleted, 
whatever)...bounces come from joe at b.com, who of course is not 
subscribed.

By generating the VGER sender, the message comes back to a specific 
address at audifans, with the original subscriber's address encoded 
in the user; the mail server knows to ignore anything before the +, 
but Mailman sees the To header and pulls the original subscriber 
email from that.

This happens on 1 in 10 messages from the list(it is too 
processing-intensive to do it on every message), and any message that 
is ordinarily personalized anyway(password reminders and the like.)

You should filter on the List-Id headers, although this ends up 
routing password reminders and such to the same mailbox(which is not 
necessarily a bad thing, but may confuse people- it's confused me a 
few times.)

Brett
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