From list-managers-owner Fri Oct 1 11:09:24 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA04127; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 11:02:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from gsp.org (rsk.itw.com [208.211.3.21]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id LAA04120 for ; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 11:01:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from rsk@localhost) by gsp.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA03423 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 14:19:54 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 14:19:49 -0400 From: Rich Kulawiec To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Anyone else seeing probes from meta-list.net? Message-ID: <19991001141949.A3409@gsp.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk My majordomo log shows: Oct 01 05:35:51 gsp.org majordomo[29085] {67360-trace-robot@meta-list.net} lists There doesn't seem to be any useful content at www.meta-list.net (just the default install page for Apache) so I'm at somewhat of a loss as to just what's going on here. ---Rsk Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org From list-managers-owner Fri Oct 1 16:22:59 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA07807; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 16:17:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from godai.maison-otaku.net (godai.maison-otaku.net [216.122.4.241]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id QAA07800 for ; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 16:17:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (loki@localhost) by godai.maison-otaku.net (8.7.4/8.7.3) with ESMTP id QAA00282; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 16:34:33 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: godai.maison-otaku.net: loki owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 16:34:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeremy Blackman To: Rich Kulawiec cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Anyone else seeing probes from meta-list.net? In-Reply-To: <19991001141949.A3409@gsp.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Rich Kulawiec wrote: > My majordomo log shows: > > Oct 01 05:35:51 gsp.org majordomo[29085] > {67360-trace-robot@meta-list.net} lists I see similar probes from -trace-robot@meta-list.net to listar@ on various of my machines. (I'm not sure whether to be flattered or worried that Listar is apparently common enough now to warrant being in list-scanning automation routines.) In particular, listar@nausicaa.net and listar@listar.org were probed for lists. > There doesn't seem to be any useful content at www.meta-list.net (just > the default install page for Apache) so I'm at somewhat of a loss as > to just what's going on here. Well, the domain belongs to SPEED-LINK GmbH, a German company. My wild guess - since they're only probing for what lists exist, not for list membership - is that they're planning to set up yet another service to offer a frontend subscription to mailing lists they don't actually provide... :/ From list-managers-owner Fri Oct 1 19:50:05 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id TAA09609; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 19:37:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ivan.iecc.com (ivan.iecc.com [208.31.42.33]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id TAA09602 for ; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 19:37:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 16695 invoked by uid 100); 1 Oct 1999 22:54:57 -0400 Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 22:54:57 -0400 (EDT) From: John R Levine To: Jeremy Blackman cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Anyone else seeing probes from meta-list.net? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk It's probing my majordomo lists as well. I keep copies of my request mail, so here's what it said. I'm not sure why the world needs yet another list spider. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 ---snip--- Received: from m11.meta-list.net (8@62.157.134.19) by mail2.iecc.com with SMTP; 1 Oct 1999 05:36:36 -0400 Received: from wallner by m11.meta-list.net with local (Exim 3.02 #1) id 11Wz78-0001ki-00 for majordomo@gurus.com; Fri, 01 Oct 1999 11:36:30 +0200 Subject: To: majordomo@gurus.com From: 59278-trace-robot@meta-list.net Message-Id: Date: Fri, 01 Oct 1999 11:36:30 +0200 LISTS END -- This mail addressed to the list server majordomo@gurus.com was generated automatically in order to compile publicly accessible mailing lists in an index of the project Meta-List (starting October 1999). Normally you would not see this mail as it is a robot-to-robot message. However if you do read this mail and have any questions regarding it, please address these to: info@meta-list.net The Meta-List Team. Diese Mail an den Listserver majordomo@gurus.com wurde automatisch generiert um oeffentlich zugaengliche Listen in einen Index des Projektes Meta-List (startet im Oktober 1999) aufzunehmen. Normalerweise sehen Sie diese Mail niemals da es sich um eine Robot to Robot Kommunikation handelt, aber falls doch und Sie Fragen zu dieser Mail haben, so wenden Sie sich an: info@meta-list.net Ihr Meta-List Team. From list-managers-owner Sat Oct 2 07:22:12 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id HAA18275; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 07:15:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from claude.akamai.com (dmshaw.ne.mediaone.net [24.218.137.194]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id HAA18268 for ; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 07:15:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from dshaw@localhost) by claude.akamai.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) id KAA07021 for list-managers@GreatCircle.COM; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 10:33:08 -0400 Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 10:33:08 -0400 From: David Shaw To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Anyone else seeing probes from meta-list.net? Message-ID: <19991002103308.A31373@jabberwocky.com> Mail-Followup-To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM References: <19991001141949.A3409@gsp.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.5i In-Reply-To: ; from Jeremy Blackman on Fri, Oct 01, 1999 at 04:34:32PM -0700 X-PGP-Fingerprint: 3CB3B415/2048/4D 96 83 18 2B AF BE 45 D0 07 C4 07 51 37 B3 18 X-URL: http://www.jabberwocky.com/ X-Phase-Of-Moon: The Moon is Waning Gibbous (51% of Full) X-Pointless-Random-Number: 158 X-Time-Til-Y2K: 12 weeks, 6 days, 14 hours, 29 minutes, 18 seconds X-Time-Til-Wedding: 5 weeks, 1 days, 7 hours, 29 minutes, 18 seconds X-Silly-Header: It sure is. Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Fri, Oct 01, 1999 at 04:34:32PM -0700, Jeremy Blackman wrote: > On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Rich Kulawiec wrote: > > > My majordomo log shows: > > > > Oct 01 05:35:51 gsp.org majordomo[29085] > > {67360-trace-robot@meta-list.net} lists > > I see similar probes from -trace-robot@meta-list.net to > listar@ on various of my machines. (I'm not sure whether to be > flattered or worried that Listar is apparently common enough now to > warrant being in list-scanning automation routines.) In particular, > listar@nausicaa.net and listar@listar.org were probed for lists. > > > There doesn't seem to be any useful content at www.meta-list.net (just > > the default install page for Apache) so I'm at somewhat of a loss as > > to just what's going on here. > > Well, the domain belongs to SPEED-LINK GmbH, a German company. My wild > guess - since they're only probing for what lists exist, not for list > membership - is that they're planning to set up yet another service to > offer a frontend subscription to mailing lists they don't actually > provide... :/ I suspect you're right, though their web page (See http://www.speed-link.de/internetfall/) doesn't go so far as to mention subscription services - just a search engine. I got probed twice.. I'll be amusing to see if their system is smart enough to remove duplicates. David -- David Shaw | dshaw@jabberwocky.com | WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/ +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson From list-managers-owner Sat Oct 2 16:09:16 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id PAA23133; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 15:39:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: (mcb@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) id PAA23124 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 15:39:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from FSM-1.PICA.ARMY.MIL (fsm-1.pica.army.mil [129.139.96.87]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id KAA16654 for ; Thu, 30 Sep 1999 10:14:34 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 30 Sep 99 13:33:20 EDT From: Info-LabVIEW List Maintainer To: WebMaster , list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Re: ??SPAM?? Message-ID: <9909301333.aa10351@fsm-1.fsm-1.pica.army.mil> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk >Question; I'm getting SPAM messages sent out the a list from someone = >not >subscribed and is not a good return address. How are they doing this >and how do I put a stop to it? =20 Is your list a closed list with subscribe confirmation turned on? If not, there's not much you can do except live with the problem. Tom Coradeschi, Info-LabVIEW List Maintainer http://labview.pica.army.mil/ From list-managers-owner Sat Oct 2 16:25:49 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id PAA23248; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 15:39:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: (mcb@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) id PAA23226 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 15:39:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from iridium.mv.net (iridium.mv.net [199.125.85.17]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id LAA04588 for ; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 11:39:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: (mem@localhost) by iridium.mv.net (8.9.3/8.9.3/mem-971025) id OAA03394; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 14:56:01 -0400 (EDT) From: "Mark E. Mallett" Message-Id: <199910011856.OAA03394@iridium.mv.net> Subject: Re: Anyone else seeing probes from meta-list.net? To: rsk@gsp.org (Rich Kulawiec) Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 14:56:01 -0400 (EDT) Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-Reply-To: <19991001141949.A3409@gsp.org> from "Rich Kulawiec" at Oct 1, 99 02:19:49 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] Content-Type: text Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > My majordomo log shows: > > Oct 01 05:35:51 gsp.org majordomo[29085] {67360-trace-robot@meta-list.net} lists > > There doesn't seem to be any useful content at www.meta-list.net (just > the default install page for Apache) so I'm at somewhat of a loss as > to just what's going on here. Saw the same thing here at 10:47 today. We have "lists" turned off, so they didn't get anything here anyway :-) -mm- -- Mark E. Mallett | http://www.mv.com/users/mem/ MV Communications, Inc. | http://www.mv.com/ NH Internet Access since 1991 | (603) 629-0000 / FAX: 629-0049 From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 3 13:40:24 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA06837; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 13:25:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from DATA.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU (DATA.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU [128.2.232.11]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id NAA06826 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 13:25:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU by DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU (PMDF V5.1-10 #7763) id <01JGPCXU3CCGA73B5G@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU> for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 16:41:48 EDT Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 16:41:47 -0400 (EDT) From: "A. Shettle" Subject: How to enable anon postings? To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Message-id: <01JGPCXUAKR6A73B5G@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU> X-VMS-To: IN%"list-managers@greatcircle.com" X-VMS-Cc: RED_TREK MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Someone wants to be able to post to my e-mail discussion list anonymously. Lives literally depend on this person being able to keep his/her identity anonymous when posting. I know the lowest-tech answer would simply be for this person to send posts via me and then for me to strip identifying information (headers etc.) before forwarding to the list. But given how much is at risk if I were to ever make a stupid human error by hitting the wrong button or something, as you can imagine I want to eliminate human error from the process as much as possible. I know nothing can be 100 percent fool-proof, but I want something as close to it as possible. What are the various options open to us? What anon remailers are out there, how do they work, how reliable are they, etc.? I'm interested both in learning about the technical side of things and also in hearing from other list-managers who need to deal with extreme confidentiality on their lists for life-and-death reasons. This can be for any reason (e.g., lists for survivors of domestic violence or childhood abuse, etc.), but especially ones with international scope (oppressive governments, etc.) Are there any other implications I need to keep in mind that go beyond purely technical aspects of this situation? I want to make sure I don't overlook anything. Thanks in advance to everyone who is able to offer any assistance, information, or feedback. Andrea red_trek@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 3 14:41:12 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id OAA07295; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:24:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from server.postmodern.com (server.postmodern.com [216.240.39.3]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id OAA07288 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:24:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from mcb@localhost) by server.postmodern.com (8.8.5/mcb-980201) id OAA21577; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:42:38 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199910032142.OAA21577@server.postmodern.com> From: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:42:37 +0000 In-Reply-To: <01JGPCXUAKR6A73B5G@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU> X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: How to enable anon postings? Cc: "A. Shettle" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > Someone wants to be able to post to my e-mail discussion list > anonymously. Lives literally depend on this person being able > to keep his/her identity anonymous when posting. I know the > lowest-tech answer would simply be for this person to send > posts via me and then for me to strip identifying information > (headers etc.) before forwarding to the list. But given how > much is at risk if I were to ever make a stupid > human error by hitting the wrong button or something, as you > can imagine I want to eliminate human error from the process > as much as possible. I know nothing can be 100 percent fool-proof, > but I want something as close to it as possible. The most reasonable solution is a Web mail account, such as iName (mail.com), usa.net, HotMail, or a dozen others. Some, perhaps most, of these, send the sender's IP address as a field in the header; depending on how the user gets Web service, that may or may not provide useful identifying information. AltaVista free mail (altavista.iname.com) provides Web mail service that does NOT send the originating IP address with the message. Of course, it is known to iname.com, but someone would have to get it from them by legal process or a break-in, and then, as above, it may not provide identifying information. The value of the client IP address is less if the user comes from a large site with a Web proxy (e.g., AOL), or uses an intermediate proxy site like anonymizer.com. This used to be a big issue for lists and list maintainers, but is pretty much moot since the era of free Web mail services. -- Michael C. Berch mcb@postmodern.com / mcb@greatcircle.com From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 3 16:09:54 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id PAA07984; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 15:57:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from bigtime.blank.org (bigtime.blank.org [139.167.64.222]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id PAA07977 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 15:57:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 29599 invoked by uid 500); 3 Oct 1999 23:14:45 -0000 Message-ID: <19991003191444.X1263@blank.org> Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 19:14:44 -0400 From: "Nathan J. Mehl" To: "A. Shettle" , list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Re: How to enable anon postings? References: <01JGPCXUAKR6A73B5G@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i In-Reply-To: <01JGPCXUAKR6A73B5G@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU>; from A. Shettle on Sun, Oct 03, 1999 at 04:41:47PM -0400 Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk In the immortal words of A. Shettle (RED_TREK@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU): > Someone wants to be able to post to my e-mail discussion list > anonymously. Lives literally depend on this person being able > to keep his/her identity anonymous when posting. > > What are the various options open to us? What anon remailers > are out there, how do they work, how reliable are they, etc.? The simplest, and probably most fool-proof method, is simply to have this person open an account at one of the various free web-based email services, such as mail.com, hotmail or netaddress. Most of them do zero validation of information provided when opening an account, and as long as you play by their abuse policies, the odds of anybody taking an interest in the account are minimal. For extra bonus security, use an anonymizing web service such as anonymizer.com to access the webmail account, so that if the Black Hats manage to lean on the webmail provider, there won't be anything for them to trace. Disclaimer and full disclosure: I work for one of the aforementioned free email services. :) -n ----------------------------------------------------------- "Hiroshima '45, Chernobyl '86, Windows '95" ----------------------------------------------- From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 3 16:40:36 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA08272; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 16:28:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from uq.net.au (fox.uq.net.au [203.101.255.1]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id QAA08265 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 16:28:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from gateway-gp6-366 (dyn-8-144.dialin.uq.net.au [203.100.8.144]) by uq.net.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA21458 for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 09:45:50 +1000 (GMT+1000) Message-Id: <199910032345.JAA21458@uq.net.au> From: "EDA Resource Centre" To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 09:46:25 +1000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Servers altering email? In-reply-to: <199910030800.BAA27968@honor.greatcircle.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12a) Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk I've had a funny problem with my mailing list over the weekend: My list is sent out as BCCs and usually there is no problem, but I've had email going through to the list members with the body text altered with a message about a bad address: Here are some interesting headers (not mine): X-Mailer: T-Online eMail 2.3 X-Sender: 08677911436-0001@t-dialin.net And here is the offending little ditty being appended to the start of each message: This is an auto generated response Please Do Not Respond To This Message ------------------------------------------------ Your e-mail message cannot be read at this time. The following address(es) are currently invalid. semk03c@prodigy.com ------------------------------------------------ Would I be right is saying prodigy.com is doing this? I've isolated that address for now, but the list members are also getting multiple copies of the email. Any ideas? Stuart From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 3 17:25:45 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id RAA08678; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:09:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ivan.iecc.com (ivan.iecc.com [208.31.42.33]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id RAA08671 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:09:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 20403 invoked by uid 100); 3 Oct 1999 20:26:53 -0400 Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 20:26:53 -0400 (EDT) From: John R Levine To: "Michael C. Berch" cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: How to enable anon postings? In-Reply-To: <199910032142.OAA21577@server.postmodern.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > The most reasonable solution is a Web mail account, such as > iName (mail.com), usa.net, HotMail, or a dozen others. Some, > perhaps most, of these, send the sender's IP address as a field > in the header; depending on how the user gets Web service, that > may or may not provide useful identifying information. Quite right. There are free web mail servers all over the world, so to be particularly secure the anonymous correspondent should look for one in a country unlikely to cooperate with a fishing expedition from the correspondent's government. Possibilities include: asean-mail.com (Thailand) eastmail.com (Japan, admins are so incompetent they probably couldn't respond to a subpoena if they wanted to) ekilat.com (Indonesia) freemail.hu (Hungary) gigileung.org (Hong Kong) gmx.de (Germany) mailbr.com.br (Brazil) newmail.net (Israel) polbox.com (Poland) Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 3 17:40:28 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id RAA08841; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:20:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from shell7.ba.best.com (shell7.ba.best.com [206.184.139.138]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id RAA08831 for ; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:19:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from cnorman@localhost) by shell7.ba.best.com (8.9.3/8.9.2/best.sh) id RAA28264; Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:37:27 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:37:27 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199910040037.RAA28264@shell7.ba.best.com> From: Cyndi Norman To: RED_TREK@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU CC: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM, cnorman@best.com In-reply-to: <01JGPCXUAKR6A73B5G@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU> (RED_TREK@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU) Subject: Re: How to enable anon postings? Reply-to: cnorman@best.com Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Andrea, I encourage people to post anon to the mailing lists I run if they feel they need to. Most people use their real names and addresses but even "real" addresses these days don't have complete information. Some lists require a real email address and a full name (and company affliation if appropriate). I think this is fine if stated ahead of time. It really depends on the list. I run a list for people with immune system health problems. Most members got this way from chemical injury. This means many people are trying to talk about their health with workplace management snoops spying on them (this has happened) or they are involved in legal action against their employers or they are involved in other lawsuits or political action. I also run a spin-off list for people with these health problems who are also abuse survivors. The desire for anonimity should be obvious in that case. I used to go through a complicated proceedure of having people send me anon posts and I would strip the headers. I only did this for once in a while, not regular posts. Fortunately, it's just not an issue anymore. I'll still strip headers for the regular poster who posts with a real name who simply wants to post anon once (I make it appear that it came from the address box123@immuneweb.org (I change the number as needed)...I own that domain and set up a forward so the email address really works...this is for short-term use only and I do the same for the classified ads I run on the web). But most people don't need this. Tell your subscribers to get a free email address. Xoom.com, operamail.com, juno.com, yahoo, geocities, hotmail, rocketmail, whatever. If you have problems with any of the above, or simply prefer one or more over the others, tell your subscribers which ones to use. Tell them not to use their real name and, voila!, instant anon email. Half your subscribers probably already do this anyway. Heck, most ISP's don't show the person's real name unless the user desires that. On AOL you can have different screen names and be as anon as you wish. You may have to explain this all to your subscribers who ask about anon posting. Many people, espeically internet newbies, just don't see the obvious. I had one subscriber from a Juno account not want to join one of my lists because her real name was on the account. I suggested she get a second Juno account with a fake name. This is what she did...it never would have occurred to her had I not suggested it and she saved herself hours of agonizing over what was okay to say "publically." If you've ever had a serious problem with a subscriber (harrassment, death threats, etc) you know that even the ones that look like they are using their real names are very hard to trace. Unless the police get involved, you'll probably never know their home address, for example. Even very cooperative ISP's, like AOL, won't tell you a user's identifying info directly. So, honestly, there isn't much difference between an ordinary subscriber and an anon one. Most people can't tell the difference. Cyndi -- _______________________________________________________________________________ "There's nothing wrong with me. Maybe there's Cyndi Norman something wrong with the universe." (ST:TNG) cyndi@consultclarity.com http://www.consultclarity.com/ _________________ Owner of the Immune Website & Lists http://www.immuneweb.org/ From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 4 11:48:59 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA21604; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 11:36:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Kitten.mcs.com (Kitten.mcs.com [192.160.127.90]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id LAA21597 for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 11:36:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Venus.mcs.net (dattier@Venus.mcs.net [192.160.127.92]) by Kitten.mcs.com (8.8.7/8.8.2) with ESMTP id NAA18001 for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:54:11 -0500 (CDT) Received: (from dattier@localhost) by Venus.mcs.net (8.9.3/8.8.2) id NAA29981 for List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:54:11 -0500 (CDT) From: "David W. Tamkin" Message-Id: <199910041854.NAA29981@Venus.mcs.net> Subject: Re: Servers altering email? In-Reply-To: <199910032345.JAA21458@uq.net.au> from EDA Resource Centre at "Oct 4, 1999 09:46:25 am" Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:54:11 -0500 (CDT) Cc: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk [Actually, "servers failing to alter email" is more like it.] Stuart got a bounce from Prodigy that was remailed to his list's submission address: | My list is sent out as BCCs and usually there is no problem, but I've had | email going through to the list members with the body text altered with a | message about a bad address: | | Here are some interesting headers (not mine): | | X-Mailer: T-Online eMail 2.3 | X-Sender: 08677911436-0001@t-dialin.net | | And here is the offending little ditty being appended to the | start of each message: | | This is an auto generated response | | Please Do Not Respond To This Message | | ------------------------------------------------ | Your e-mail message cannot be read at this time. The following address(es) | are currently invalid. | semk03c@prodigy.com | ------------------------------------------------ | Would I be right is saying prodigy.com is doing this? I've isolated that | address for now, but the list members are also getting multiple copies of | the email. Any ideas? Yes, you are right. I had two bounces from Prodigy yesterday: one fine, normal, came to the address I had used as the envelope sender, phrased as an NDN. The other was like yours: the envelope sender was changed to postmaster@prodigy.com (or maybe .net), one more Received: header was added for its trip back to my list's host, those same lines were inserted at the top of the body except that the "currently invalid" address was different [of course]; but all the other RFC822 headers were reused directly from the post as it had left the list, and below that insertion the text was returned flush left. It was sent back to the list's submission address as found in the To: header. Stuart noticed two additional X- headers; I did not see them on the bounce I got, so perhaps they were from the original submitter's mail client and were on the post rather than having been added by Prodigy? Since Prodigy is sending these back to the To: address, they are getting reposted to the list. If your list allows open posting or uses From: to verify that the poster is a member, this sort of thing will go right through and everyone will get another copy of the post, this time as re-sent by Prodigy's daemon with the extra text inserted, just as Stuart found. Worse yet would be the case of a digest issue, where Prodigy's daemon would spit an entire digest back out at reflector readers. This is highly unfriendly and, given the false From: and the return to To: rather than to the envelope sender, completely in violation. If you run an unmoderated list and have any Prodigy users on it, especially in reflector mode, I'd suggest putting in a loop detection filter for these. It worked for me. From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 4 15:04:19 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id OAA23636; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 14:51:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ivan.iecc.com (ivan.iecc.com [208.31.42.33]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id OAA23629 for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 14:51:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 12928 invoked by uid 100); 4 Oct 1999 18:09:23 -0400 Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 18:09:23 -0400 (EDT) From: John R Levine To: "David W. Tamkin" cc: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Servers altering email? In-Reply-To: <199910041854.NAA29981@Venus.mcs.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > This is highly unfriendly and, given the false From: and the return to To: > rather than to the envelope sender, completely in violation. If you run an > unmoderated list and have any Prodigy users on it, especially in reflector > mode, I'd suggest putting in a loop detection filter for these. It worked > for me. This is a short term problem, fortunately. Any prodigy.com address is the old Prodigy Classic videotex service which will be shut down before the end of the year due to a combination of Y2K problems and its fundamental awfulness. (I hear they still have over 100K subscribers, which must say something about people's preference for the devil they know.) Their prodigy.net service is a normal ISP and their mail system isn't broken any worse than anyone else's. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 From list-managers-owner Thu Oct 7 11:57:05 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA11365; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:46:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: (mcb@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) id LAA11354 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:46:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp1.vnet.net (smtp1.vnet.net [166.82.1.31]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id SAA24944 for ; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 18:20:02 -0700 (PDT) Received: from katie.vnet.net (katie.vnet.net [166.82.1.7]) by smtp1.vnet.net (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id VAA14068 for ; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 21:37:37 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (murr@localhost) by katie.vnet.net (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id VAA16113 for ; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 21:37:37 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 21:37:37 -0400 (EDT) From: murr rhame To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: ??SPAM?? In-Reply-To: <9909301333.aa10351@fsm-1.fsm-1.pica.army.mil> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Info-LabVIEW List Maintainer wrote: >> Question; I'm getting SPAM messages sent out the a list from >> someone not subscribed and is not a good return address. How >> are they doing this and how do I put a stop to it? > > Is your list a closed list with subscribe confirmation turned > on? If not, there's not much you can do except live with the > problem. If his list isn't closed and setup for subscription confirmation he probably doesn't know what you are talking about. Closed List - The list only accepts posts from subscribers. This simple measure stops most casual spammers. Most spammers I've encountered don't bother to subscribe. They just pick up the list address from a directory and blast away. Without this filter, your list is very vulnerable to spam. Subscription Confirmation - The software (or list admin) sends email to the address that requested the subscription. The subscriber must reply from that address to join. Many software packages send the potential subscriber a "cookie" that must be returned to activate the subscription. The cookie is a serial number that usually expires in a few days. If the cookie isn't returned in the specified time, the subscribe request expires. Both of these security measures are pretty basic. I would not consider hosting a public list with software that did not support these very important features. If you don't know how to activate these options, read the manual for your software or ask for help on the support list for your software. - murr - From list-managers-owner Fri Oct 8 08:51:43 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id IAA26235; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 08:44:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from postoffice.npac.syr.edu (postoffice.npac.syr.edu [128.230.7.230]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id IAA26228 for ; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 08:44:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from snake.npac.syr.edu (snake.npac.syr.edu [128.230.162.60]) by postoffice.npac.syr.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA18071; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:03:15 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (bernhold@localhost) by snake.npac.syr.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id MAA95225; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:03:14 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199910081603.MAA95225@snake.npac.syr.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: snake.npac.syr.edu: bernhold@localhost didn't use HELO protocol Reply-to: bernhold@npac.syr.edu To: list-managers@greatcircle.com cc: bernhold@npac.syr.edu Subject: Lists, news, and searching Date: Fri, 08 Oct 1999 12:03:14 -0400 From: "David E. Bernholdt" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk I run some mailing lists. I am thinking about providing (a) usenet version of the lists, and (b) a fully searchable archive of the lists. Obviously tools are available to provide both of these services, but it seems like using them requires duplicate storage of the entire archive. News servers have their particular format, and all of the search software I've seen works with mailing list archives in a slightly different format. I could probably take some existing tools and hack them to agree on a format, but the time I have to spare for this is very limited. For the time being, I could probably live with the double storage (disk is cheap, after all). But I'm wondering if anyone can point me to a better solution up front. Thanks very much! -- David E. Bernholdt | Email: bernhold@npac.syr.edu Northeast Parallel Architectures Center | Phone: +1 315 443 3857 111 College Place, Syracuse University | Fax: +1 315 443 1973 Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 | URL: http://www.npac.syr.edu From list-managers-owner Fri Oct 8 12:36:46 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id MAA28966; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:30:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from public.lists.apple.com (public.lists.apple.com [17.254.0.151]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id MAA28959 for ; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:29:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (A17-216-27-240.apple.com [17.216.27.240]) by public.lists.apple.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id MAA17520 ; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:47:10 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <199910081603.MAA95225@snake.npac.syr.edu> References: <199910081603.MAA95225@snake.npac.syr.edu> Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:26:54 -0700 To: bernhold@npac.syr.edu, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: Lists, news, and searching Cc: bernhold@npac.syr.edu Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 12:03 PM -0400 10/8/99, David E. Bernholdt wrote: > I could probably take some existing tools and hack them to agree on a > format, but the time I have to spare for this is very limited. For > the time being, I could probably live with the double storage (disk is > cheap, after all). But I'm wondering if anyone can point me to a > better solution up front. www.webcrossing.com -- interfaces to mail lists, and allows for both web-based and NNTP based access. I use them for my archives. A future release will integrate listserver capabilities into the program itself, so it all coalesces into a single dataset. -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Sat Oct 9 23:19:07 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id XAA18551; Sat, 9 Oct 1999 23:14:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail4.svr.pol.co.uk (mail4.svr.pol.co.uk [195.92.193.211]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id XAA18544 for ; Sat, 9 Oct 1999 23:14:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from modem-126.ruthenium.dialup.pol.co.uk ([62.136.21.254] helo=arpad.thegreen.private ident=exim) by mail4.svr.pol.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #2) id 11aCXR-00054q-00; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 07:32:58 +0100 Received: from cc047 (helo=localhost) by arpad.thegreen.private with local-esmtp (Exim 3.036 #1) id 11aCXO-0005AB-00; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 07:32:54 +0100 Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 07:32:47 +0100 (BST) From: Jeffrey Goldberg X-Sender: cc047@arpad.thegreen.private Reply-To: Jeffrey Goldberg To: postmaster@ENCEPHALON.COM, abuse@CTCHOUSTON.COM cc: postmaster@Cranfield.ac.uk, listmaster@cranfield.ac.uk, List Managers Mailing list Subject: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com Message-ID: Organization: Cranfield University Computer Centre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Every majordomo based mailing list at Cranfield.ac.uk just (early Sunday, Oct 10, 1999) experienced a subscription or attempted subscription from sbergeon@ENCEPHALON.COM Until I get a satisfactory explanation for this (which I have to take as extremely suspicious) I am blocking all email from enephalon.com to Cranfield.ac.uk. The blocking does allow mail to postmaster@Cranfield.ac.uk and to abuse@cranfield.ac.uk so there is a route by which Steve Bergeon can reach the mail administrators at Cranfield. I am sending this message to the source (postmaster@encephalon.com) and to his ISP ctchouston.com. I am also posting to the list managers list first to warn others and second in the hope that someone will be able to shed some light on this. Fortunately all lists have 'who_access = closed' and I've put in appropriate blocks in global_taboo_headers. - -j - -- Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826 Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814 J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/ Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 5.0i for non-commercial use Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBOAAzFRu6nIqxqP+5AQF9QQP9FNNSM+cm38uB0USn9jtaPLw/zrVuyfPs KipHrIHRbimc2pFWj68bPNFuFnAeWID4kwuoDT0ASa6SmHQMOW8mmD7Kzq3O0DrQ mH9VEBIwFIrUFmkE5wvE5hzVoLW4DY3HiOT+5aqFV//6Bp1scjlfKzOWkZsdG2V+ 8fRJ/wxmeZ0= =SLKZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 09:20:37 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id JAA25597; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 09:10:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id JAA25589 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 09:10:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com (LOCALHOST [127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA08997; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 09:30:39 -0700 To: Jeffrey Goldberg cc: List Managers Mailing list Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com In-reply-to: Your message of Sun, 10 Oct 1999 07:32:47 +0100. From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 09:30:39 -0700 Message-ID: <8995.939573039@monkeys.com> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk In message , Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: >Every majordomo based mailing list at Cranfield.ac.uk just (early Sunday, >Oct 10, 1999) experienced a subscription or attempted subscription from > > sbergeon@ENCEPHALON.COM > >Until I get a satisfactory explanation for this (which I have to take as >extremely suspicious) I am blocking all email from enephalon.com to >Cranfield.ac.uk... I'm glad this came up because it allows me to pose a question. As part of an anti-spam system I'm working on, it might turn out to be very helpful to know the envelope sender addresses used by various mailing lists, i.e. many/most/all of the legitimate opt-in mailing lists in existance. It seems that the only way to gather these, en mass, would be to develop some sort of automated thingy that would go and subscribe to all of the lists it could find, wiat for the first message from each list, grab the envelope sender address, and then unsubscribe. But Jeffrey's message would seem to indicate that doing this, en mass, for lots of mailing lists, might well raise hackles in many quarters. Would it? Is this sort of activity considered un-kosher, in general, or is it just considered un-kosher if there's no good explanation for it forthcoming from the party doing it? From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 09:35:43 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id JAA25712; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 09:28:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ivan.iecc.com (ivan.iecc.com [208.31.42.33]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id JAA25705 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 09:28:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 8282 invoked by uid 100); 10 Oct 1999 12:47:15 -0400 Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:47:13 -0400 (EDT) From: John R Levine To: Jeffrey Goldberg cc: List Managers Mailing list Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > Every majordomo based mailing list at Cranfield.ac.uk just (early Sunday, > Oct 10, 1999) experienced a subscription or attempted subscription from > > sbergeon@ENCEPHALON.COM > > Until I get a satisfactory explanation for this (which I have to take as > extremely suspicious) I am blocking all email from enephalon.com to > Cranfield.ac.uk. That's a reverse mailbomb attack. Someone doesn't like sbergeon and is trying to forge subscriptions to a gazillion lists. In all likelihood the forger isn't anywhere near that domain. I've set my mail aliases so I keep copies of mail to majordomo, to make it easier to track both deliberate and inadvertent mailbomb attacks like this one. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 10:50:24 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA26269; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 10:37:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from plaidworks.com (plaidworks.com [209.239.169.200]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA26262 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 10:37:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (a197.plaidworks.com [209.239.169.197] (may be forged)) by plaidworks.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA34608 ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 10:57:38 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <8995.939573039@monkeys.com> References: <8995.939573039@monkeys.com> Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 10:49:12 -0700 To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" , Jeffrey Goldberg From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com Cc: List Managers Mailing list Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 9:30 AM -0700 10/10/99, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: > Would it? Is this sort of activity considered un-kosher, in general, or > is it just considered un-kosher if there's no good explanation for it > forthcoming from the party doing it? It would be hard to tell the difference between this and someone doing prep work for a spam attack. I'd say, even if you sent email to the postmaster explaining, it'd still raise hackles, and might well not be believed by anyone who doesn't know you, explanation or no. And if this were a tool that was going to be released for general usage, I'd say it'd make list managers very, very unhappy. Imagine if, oh, procmail did this for every user. it *would* turn into an attack on list servers, from sheer volume of requests. -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 11:05:24 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA26338; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 10:48:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA26331 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 10:48:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com (LOCALHOST [127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA11753 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 11:08:56 -0700 To: List Managers Mailing list Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com In-reply-to: Your message of Sun, 10 Oct 1999 10:49:12 -0700. From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 11:08:55 -0700 Message-ID: <11751.939578935@monkeys.com> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk In message , Chuq Von Rospach wrote: >At 9:30 AM -0700 10/10/99, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: > > >> Would it? Is this sort of activity considered un-kosher, in general, or >> is it just considered un-kosher if there's no good explanation for it >> forthcoming from the party doing it? > >It would be hard to tell the difference between this and someone >doing prep work for a spam attack. I'd say, even if you sent email to >the postmaster explaining, it'd still raise hackles, and might well >not be believed by anyone who doesn't know you, explanation or no. > >And if this were a tool that was going to be released for general >usage, I'd say it'd make list managers very, very unhappy. Imagine >if, oh, procmail did this for every user. it *would* turn into an >attack on list servers, from sheer volume of requests. Well *that* is certainly not what I had in mind! Rather, I was just talking about _precompiling_ a list of envelope sender addresses for legitimate mailing lists, once and only once. (It would be prohibitively expensive to repeatedly do _anything_ relating to mailing lists, repeatedly, for each end user, or for any significant group thereof, or for each and ever message those end users receive.) From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 11:50:42 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA26891; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 11:46:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ivan.iecc.com (ivan.iecc.com [208.31.42.33]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id LAA26884 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 11:46:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 12622 invoked by uid 100); 10 Oct 1999 15:04:57 -0400 Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 15:04:57 -0400 (EDT) From: John R Levine To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" cc: List Managers Mailing list Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com In-Reply-To: <8995.939573039@monkeys.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > As part of an anti-spam system I'm working on, it might turn out to be > very helpful to know the envelope sender addresses used by various > mailing lists, i.e. many/most/all of the legitimate opt-in mailing > lists in existance. ... > > But Jeffrey's message would seem to indicate that doing this, en mass, > for lots of mailing lists, might well raise hackles in many quarters. Of course it would. It's exactly the kind of intrusive probing and scanning that's gotten you into trouble so often in the past. Lots of lists are set so that the list owner manually vets each subscription request, and list owners are unlikely to enjoy being mailbombed by your subscribe-bot. The ones that do permit automated subscription log all of the requests, and they're not going to be pleased to see a lot of mystery traffic from you either. It's not even very useful. I believe you'll find that there are only maybe 20 list management packages that are in wide use, and even with the range of MTAs that people use, you can probably come up with under a hundred patterns that would identify the lists as well as anything would. Also remember that many lists use per-recipient sender addresses to help automate bounce processing, so you'd need to do pattern matching even if you tried to collect a sender address from every single list around. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 12:35:24 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id MAA27246; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:30:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from plaidworks.com (plaidworks.com [209.239.169.200]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id MAA27237 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:30:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (a197.plaidworks.com [209.239.169.197] (may be forged)) by plaidworks.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA31106 ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:50:28 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:47:25 -0700 To: John R Levine , Jeffrey Goldberg From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com Cc: List Managers Mailing list Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 12:47 PM -0400 10/10/99, John R Levine wrote: > I've set my mail aliases so I keep copies of mail to majordomo, to make it > easier to track both deliberate and inadvertent mailbomb attacks like this > one. ditto. I try to log copies of everything, so I can backtrack if I need to. Comes in very handy. -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 12:50:24 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id MAA27245; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:30:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from plaidworks.com (plaidworks.com [209.239.169.200]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id MAA27224 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:30:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (a197.plaidworks.com [209.239.169.197] (may be forged)) by plaidworks.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA31112 ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:50:30 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <11751.939578935@monkeys.com> References: <11751.939578935@monkeys.com> Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:49:21 -0700 To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" , List Managers Mailing list From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > Rather, I was just talking about _precompiling_ a list of envelope sender > addresses for legitimate mailing lists, once and only once. understood. But imagine if everyone started doing something like that. And imagine how you'd react if random people started poking at your server like that. I don't think it'd be that useful, and I don't think it'd be that good an idea. I'm not entirely sure it buys you much, and it can easily be misinerpreted by people who are (as this list tends to show), suspicious (to paranoid) from the start, for good reason. -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 14:35:24 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id OAA28177; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 14:26:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail10.svr.pol.co.uk (mail10.svr.pol.co.uk [195.92.193.214]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id OAA28170 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 14:26:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from modem-28.finasteride.dialup.pol.co.uk ([62.136.67.28] helo=arpad.thegreen.private ident=exim) by mail10.svr.pol.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #2) id 11aQmO-0000pb-00; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 22:45:20 +0100 Received: from cc047 (helo=localhost) by arpad.thegreen.private with local-esmtp (Exim 3.036 #1) id 11aQmL-0005L8-00; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 22:45:17 +0100 Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 22:45:17 +0100 (BST) From: Jeffrey Goldberg X-Sender: cc047@arpad.thegreen.private Reply-To: Jeffrey Goldberg To: John R Levine cc: List Managers Mailing list Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Organization: Cranfield University Computer Centre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, John R Levine wrote: > That's a reverse mailbomb attack. Someone doesn't like sbergeon and is > trying to forge subscriptions to a gazillion lists. In all likelihood > the forger isn't anywhere near that domain. I've checked the MTA logs. They do come from the named domain. > I've set my mail aliases so I keep copies of mail to majordomo, to make it > easier to track both deliberate and inadvertent mailbomb attacks like this > one. Very good idea! I suspect a "which" or "who" attack. -j -- Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826 Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814 J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/ Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice. From list-managers-owner Sun Oct 10 17:05:23 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA29374; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 16:53:11 -0700 (PDT) Received: from vjs.org (vjs.telephonet.com [207.252.88.49]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id QAA29367 for ; Sun, 10 Oct 1999 16:52:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [207.252.88.49] (207.252.90.49) by vjs.org with ESMTP (Eudora Internet Mail Server 2.2); Sun, 10 Oct 1999 20:10:43 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: X-Organization: Little to None X-Mailer: Eudora 5.0 for Cray T3E-1200 Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 20:10:25 -0400 To: Jeffrey Goldberg From: Vince Sabio Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com Cc: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk ** Sometime around 22:45 +0100 10/10/1999, Jeffrey Goldberg said: >On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, John R Levine wrote: > > > That's a reverse mailbomb attack. Someone doesn't like sbergeon and is > > trying to forge subscriptions to a gazillion lists. In all likelihood > > the forger isn't anywhere near that domain. > >I've checked the MTA logs. They do come from the named domain. But that's not necessarily *Steve Bergeon's* domain, which is (I believe) the point that John was making. It really does smell of a reverse-mailbomb attack. __________________________________________________________________________ Vince Sabio Got Bounces? vince-lists@vjs.org Got Jokes? Got Spam? From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 05:04:53 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id EAA07726; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 04:51:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from euler.central.cranfield.ac.uk (euler.central.cranfield.ac.uk [138.250.48.9]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id EAA07719 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 04:51:39 -0700 (PDT) Received: from neumann.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk ([138.250.24.137] ident=cc047) by euler.central.cranfield.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #1) id 11aeHr-0000tm-00; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 13:10:43 +0100 Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:27:42 +0100 (BST) From: Jeffrey Goldberg X-Sender: cc047@neumann.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk Reply-To: Jeffrey Goldberg To: Vince Sabio cc: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Organization: Cranfield University Computer Centre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, Vince Sabio wrote: > ** Sometime around 22:45 +0100 10/10/1999, Jeffrey Goldberg said: > > >On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, John R Levine wrote: > > > > > That's a reverse mailbomb attack. Someone doesn't like sbergeon and is > > > trying to forge subscriptions to a gazillion lists. In all likelihood > > > the forger isn't anywhere near that domain. > > > >I've checked the MTA logs. They do come from the named domain. > > But that's not necessarily *Steve Bergeon's* domain, which is (I believe) > the point that John was making. It really does smell of a reverse-mailbomb > attack. The incoming mail to majordomo is from encephalon.com according to the MTA logs, as is the from address (address to be subscribed). The domain itself is owned by Stever Bergeon (Internic whois). The mail may be many things, but it is not a forgery. I should have made it clear that that was one of the first things I checked out. -j -- Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826 Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814 J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/ Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice. From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 09:02:48 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id IAA09924; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 08:28:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from euler.central.cranfield.ac.uk (euler.central.cranfield.ac.uk [138.250.48.9]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id IAA09917 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 08:28:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from neumann.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk ([138.250.24.137] ident=cc047) by euler.central.cranfield.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #1) id 11ahfS-0004xe-00; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:47:18 +0100 Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:04:13 +0100 (BST) From: Jeffrey Goldberg X-Sender: cc047@neumann.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk Reply-To: Jeffrey Goldberg To: list-managers@greatcircle.com cc: Steve Bergeon , postmaster@Cranfield.ac.uk Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com (fwd) Message-ID: Organization: Cranfield University Computer Centre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Steve Bergeon has answered a number of questions that I posed to him, and I believe his answers. I have removed the block on his site. I think that it is clear that I had to initially take his action as an attack until some reasonable alternative were offerred. Going for him was the fact that there was never any evidence of an attempt to conceal the source. The incoming mail for example did originate from his properly configured site. Members of this list might be very interested in his stated reason for his action in light of the recent discussion of exactly this question. Mass subscribing to lists in an attempt to work out what the envelope froms look like for bigger and better anti-spam systems will cause panic among list managers around the world. Also note that many individual list management tasks are done "manually" by the list managers including the approval of subscription requests. Trying to gather list information on a mass basis, no matter how good the cause, this way in general would cause a tremendous amount of work for listmanagers. I have half a dozen list managers at Cranfield asking me "who is sbergeon, and why is he trying to subscribe to ..." So, if people need to gather information about how different lists provide envelope-froms, this is not the way. Remember, list subscription, especially for restricted lists, is an entirely automated processes. It is true that a number of lists that should be no-advertise for outside Cranfield are infact advertised. I have been cleaning up those. As far as I am concerned this is no longer a case of potential abuse. I know that it seems that I may have over reacted, but two years ago I was hit by something similar which very much was malicious. Steve Bergeon response to a message I sent him is below. - -j - -- Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826 Assistant Postmaster Cranfield Computer Centre J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/ Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice. - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 19:21:13 -0500 From: Steve Bergeon To: postmaster@Cranfield.ac.uk Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com > > On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, Steve Bergeon wrote: > > > Sorry for all the ruckus, I was just looking for some lists > > to sign up for. As list manager, of course it's in your purview > > to disallow access to me. I just got a little carried away, no > > nefarious intent. > > Can you please reply (to postmaster) with some more detail. > > (1) Was your subscription scripted or did you manually construct > and send the necessary subscription messages? Scripts were used to generate both the initial subscription message and the reply's with authorization. > > (2) Some of the lists that you attempted to subscribe to were not > publically advertised/listed. Please describe in detail how you got > the names of the lists to subscribe to? They were all publicly available. What was used as input to the scripts was the output of a 'lists' command to your majordomo. Had I actually read the list it would have been apparent that many lists were closed. Again I apologize for that oversight. > > (3) Was Cranfield the only site you did this at or were there others? > If so, list the others so that I can consult with their mail > managers. If not, how or why did you pick Cranfield.ac.uk? > I also have the feeling that your name and address is familiar; > have we possibly crossed paths before. There was one other, I have apologized to them as well. They have chosen to not allow me on restricted lists but have no problem with the rest. Obviously my mistake was to (yes stupid, and again I apologize) assume that publicly available lists were for public consumption. Cranfield was chosen because it showed up on a search result for 'lists' on either yahoo or excite (I don't remember). If we have crossed paths, I don't recall. I try not to kick over hornet's nests as a general rule. > > (4) Please explain why when just looking for some lists to subscribe to > you didn't use the "info" command, but actually subscribed? Your > search for lists to subscribe to seems indescrimenent. You > subscribed to lists about usage of particular software at Cranfield > to lists for students in particular course to lists of participants > from an on-line conference from a year ago. Well yes, it was indiscriminate. As I said I just fed the output of the lists command into a script. My mistake, I apologize. > > I am certainly willing to accept a story involving silly mistakes > and misunderstandings, but you've got to actually provide me with > a plausible story, instead of of saying "oops". If you suspect that I am hostile, clearly you will never accept any explanation that I could give as it could easily be a fabrication. > > Until I get credible answers to those questions, I will consider your > activity hostile, and continue the blocking. As anybody would concede, that is your prerogative. > > Another question > > (5) May I have your permission to quote your message (and our > exchange on a mailing list managers mailing list where the > specific incident is being discussed. Note that it is in your > interest, if innocent, for that to happen, since others are > discussion blocking your site as well. > Once it is written in an email, there is no reason that you would not do as you wish with the text. If you feel that some balance can be achieved by some sort of public camgaign against me, nothing I would do or say could stop you. I can only keep apologizing... > > My apologies again for any inconvenience. > > What you have done looks like the prelude to either spamming the lists or > attempting to harvest list member addresses. It is very hard to imagine a > benign, even if accidental, purpose. If my imagination is unduely > limited, then you have to help me out. Your website suggests that you > are quiet experienced with the Internet, making the likelihood of this > being a mistake less (but thanks for posting that rc5stats fetch script, > I've been meaning to write my own for ages!). There were several goals for this obviously ill considered venture. Mostly I wanted to amass mail for analysis of both headers and content. To see what sort, if any, new spam would come with the new lists. To see what limits procmail had. There are much easier ways to get email addresses. By the million. At best using this method I could have gotten in the range of a few hundred. My mistakes were to be indiscriminate, and to assume that publicly available lists were in fact available to the public. It was a stupid Saturday night blunder. Take me off the lists and accept my apologies. If you really want to take on some kind of crusade against me, well have fun. > > -j > > -- > Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826 > Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814 > J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/ > Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.5.1 iQCVAwUBOAIYlBu6nIqxqP+5AQElEwP+MRrF9hLYKH+qTeMq4pijo814FhTyx2an 14q5hkFqFlGM2/urbNQAxV6cq67PsWwjhNGOO2/GumxLqeWI9+Y/z/X339CV36B9 ZdkzUsq2Y5ea4zTzf8PVQkzIckF+RVoVYPz9kOZ+tWTQGIiZtFH0zodX7LKKvtlN iXeFj8qx3hU= =pwSO -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 11:10:38 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA11121; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 10:34:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: from public.lists.apple.com (public.lists.apple.com [17.254.0.151]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA11114 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 10:34:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (A17-216-27-240.apple.com [17.216.27.240]) by public.lists.apple.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id KAA16634 ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 10:52:09 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 10:53:16 -0700 To: list-managers@greatcircle.com From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Sympa? mailman? Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Has anyone out there used mailman (http://www.list.org) or Sympa (http://listes.cru.fr/sympa)? if so, what do you think of the system? Sympa really intrigues me, since I have a need for multi-lingual systems and I'd love to have built-in MySQL support and full mime capability... And list manager claims to have a good direct-SMTP delivery system that looks intriguing... any thoughts on either? chuq -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 11:25:52 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA11384; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 10:55:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA11374 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 10:55:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com (LOCALHOST [127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA17669 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 11:16:13 -0700 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com (fwd) In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:04:13 +0100. From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 11:16:13 -0700 Message-ID: <17667.939665773@monkeys.com> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk In message , Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: >Steve Bergeon has answered a number of questions that I posed to him, and >I believe his answers. I have removed the block on his site. When it came right down to it, this fellow was somewhat less than entirely specific regarding the nature and intent of his research: >>There were several goals for this obviously ill considered venture. Mostly >>I wanted to amass mail for analysis of both headers and content. To see >>what sort, if any, new spam would come with the new lists. To see what >>limits procmail had. That's not to say that his intent was anything other than honorable. I just think that it is incumbant upon anyone doing research like this to be quite clear and specific regarding the methods and goals. P.S. As long as we are still talking about it (and given that this episode makes it quite apparent that list admins may get their hackles raised by any sort of automated subscribes/unsubscribes) allow me to pose the question to the entire readership of this list: If someone sent you an E-mail (in your capacity as list managers) asking for a list of, for example, the envelope sender addresses used in outgoing traffic on/with your lists, would you send that info back, or would you balk? From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 13:51:51 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA13442; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 13:44:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mailgate.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (nz40.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de [129.13.197.4]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id NAA13435 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 13:44:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pC19F10B1.dip.t-dialin.net (uncu@rzstud1.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de [129.13.197.183]) by mailgate.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de with smtp (Exim 3.02 #2) id 11ambC-0005Yt-00; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:03:15 +0200 From: Marc.Haber-lists@gmx.de (Marc Haber) To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 21:04:02 GMT Organization: posting from University of Karlsruhe, Germany References: In-Reply-To: X-Mailer: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Sun, 10 Oct 1999 12:47:13 -0400 (EDT), you wrote: >I've set my mail aliases so I keep copies of mail to majordomo, to make = it >easier to track both deliberate and inadvertent mailbomb attacks like = this >one.=20 Is there any mailing list manager that will work with a stock MTA (that rules out listproc as I believe listproc only runs with qmail) that can be configured to include full headers of the subscription request with the confirmation request e-mail? Greetings Marc --=20 -------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! = ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im = Header Karlsruhe, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | Fon: *49 721 966 32= 15 Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fax: *49 721 966 31= 29 From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 14:21:54 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id OAA13795; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:14:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: from godai.maison-otaku.net (godai.maison-otaku.net [216.122.4.241]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id OAA13786 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:14:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (loki@localhost) by godai.maison-otaku.net (8.7.4/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA22265; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:33:28 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: godai.maison-otaku.net: loki owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:33:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeremy Blackman To: Chuq Von Rospach cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > Has anyone out there used mailman (http://www.list.org) or Sympa > (http://listes.cru.fr/sympa)? > > if so, what do you think of the system? Ok, I'm (obviously) biased, being the author of yet a third package (Listar, at http://www.listar.org/), but here's my take. Sympa has struck me as a fairly nice system overall; many of the features they have are ones planned in the future for Listar (and ironically, a number of the features they have planned in the future are ones Listar has). Their database support is nice, and I like their ability to combine multiple lists into one overall list (like Listar's 'cc-lists' functionality, although I didn't know Sympa had such a feature until today when I went to check their changelog before responding to this post). My only true complaint about it is that it is... well, a giant Perl script. Admittedly, a far better written and organized Perl script than Majordomo (in my opinion), but still... a Perl script. For large-volume lists, I tend to prefer something written in C or C++. Now, perhaps I'm biased due to some bad experiences with Mailman, but I've never particularly liked the package. For starters, I'm the sort of person who believes that while list administration and access should be POSSIBLE over the web, it should not be REQUIRED... so the fact that mailman had -no- provision for accepting commands over e-mail the last time I looked at it strongly bothered me. Additionally, it's a Python script - yet another interpreted language. As I said, it's just one of my personal quirks that I don't like running large-volume mailing lists as interpreted scripts. I watched someone run a Majordomo list with 1900 users that got 80 posts a day, and it flattened his machine... that was one of the reasons I decided to write Listar in C. :) So, my PERSONAL opinion, between the two, is that I like Sympa better - largely because it's closer to my own philosophy of how a mailing list package should work, albeit with the one (to my mind) flaw of being written in Perl. Just my $0.02 + state sales tax (where applicable). From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 15:02:58 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id OAA13975; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:34:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from public.lists.apple.com (public.lists.apple.com [17.254.0.151]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id OAA13968 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:34:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (A17-216-27-240.apple.com [17.216.27.240]) by public.lists.apple.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id OAA33106 ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:51:50 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:45:48 -0700 To: Jeremy Blackman , Chuq Von Rospach From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk thanks for the info. Will have to look at listar, too. > As I said, it's just one of my personal quirks that I don't like running > large-volume mailing lists as interpreted scripts. I watched someone run > a Majordomo list with 1900 users that got 80 posts a day, and it flattened > his machine... that was one of the reasons I decided to write Listar in C. My experience, FWIW, is that the interpreted aspects of the server rarely are the problem. Majordomo doesn't scale well to large lists, but mostly because it's spending its time whacking at flat text files (and I don't care how fast your language or server is, you can only grep through a text file so fast...). heck, I used to run a busier site tham the 1900/80 on a 68K box years ago. The big performance areas are the update I/O and delivery overhead. Both swamp whatever overhead the server language might cause... In my personal opinion, of course. No reason NOt to use C or C++, but I've got a modified version of majordomo running pretty well with well over a million subscribers. And it'll get even better once I fully get MySQL implemented on the back end (right now, we're only driving unsubscribes from the database, and feeding commands into majordomo. Soon, we'll simply be removing majordomo and driving it all with custom code) > So, my PERSONAL opinion, between the two, is that I like Sympa better - > largely because it's closer to my own philosophy of how a mailing list > package should work, albeit with the one (to my mind) flaw of being > written in Perl. thanks. My 30 minute quick-lookover leans in the same direction, but I'd really love to run into folks who've used the servers and see how they run in the real world, before I choose one to start kicking the tires with... And, FWIW, the python/perl thing bothers me, too. Gee, just what I want to do -- learn yet another programming language.... (grin) -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 15:23:47 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id PAA14455; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:10:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: from cranium.encephalon.com (cranium.encephalon.com [208.246.217.212]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id PAA14446 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:10:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from encephalon.com (cranium.encephalon.com [208.246.217.212]) by cranium.encephalon.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA19275 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:29:24 -0500 Message-ID: <3802658A.CE33A1E6@encephalon.com> Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:32:42 -0500 From: Steve Bergeon X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Idiot of the hour Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Hello folks, it would appear that I've used up a goodly portion of my 15 minutes of fame. Unlike Mr Guilmette, I dashed off an ill conceived experiment without conferring with the community at large. As a result hackles were raised, feathers ruffled, etc. What was learned with regard to general attitudes was minimal, since the experiment was limited to only a couple of sites. The Cranfield site had 59 lists, and you all know the bad will generated from that. Since Mr Goldberg released his lock my site has received some dozen or so mails. Cranfield is a University site. The other site had a bit over 800 lists. Many of those lists were closed, but the remainder are currently generating 20-40 mails an hour. The admin of the site sent me a note asking what kind of butt-head would do such a thing, but accepted my proffered apologies without any further ado. This site was not academia, but general interest related. Can any conclusions be drawn from this small sample? Let me hazard a couple for debate: 1) The response from the site used in this way is not proportional to the number of lists. If somebody signed up for all of the four lists at my site, I'd probably notice. 2) The number of lists subscribed to (over one) is not a primary issue either. At a guess, three subscriptions in a short period of time would probably be enough to trigger alarms. 3) The admin's conclusions and assumptions based on their experience will vary wildly. 4) The goals of the lists appear to be the primary predictive factor when guessing how much will hit the fan. The lists made for truly general public consumption very much want 'masses of asses'. Other lists may be designed for a more specific audience, like alumni or current students. So, some public lists really aren't. From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 15:37:53 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id PAA14398; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:06:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from godai.maison-otaku.net (godai.maison-otaku.net [216.122.4.241]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id PAA14391 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:06:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (loki@localhost) by godai.maison-otaku.net (8.7.4/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA22388; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:25:57 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: godai.maison-otaku.net: loki owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:25:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeremy Blackman To: Chuq Von Rospach cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > My experience, FWIW, is that the interpreted aspects of the server > rarely are the problem. Majordomo doesn't scale well to large lists, > but mostly because it's spending its time whacking at flat text files > (and I don't care how fast your language or server is, you can only > grep through a text file so fast...). heck, I used to run a busier > site tham the 1900/80 on a 68K box years ago. I won't deny that in the least - one reason an abstract database support layer (MySDL, Postgres, etc.) is a high priority for Listar. However, one of the problems with Majordomo is also that, for a high-traffic list, it's re-parsing the whole program (which is NOT a trivially-sized Perl script) for each post. Ouchie! > The big performance areas are the update I/O and delivery overhead. > Both swamp whatever overhead the server language might cause... In my > personal opinion, of course. No reason NOt to use C or C++, but I've > got a modified version of majordomo running pretty well with well > over a million subscribers. And it'll get even better once I fully > get MySQL implemented on the back end (right now, we're only driving > unsubscribes from the database, and feeding commands into majordomo. > Soon, we'll simply be removing majordomo and driving it all with > custom code) Often times, this may be the way to do it. I've found it may be easier to write a custom app than make an existing one do things the way that works best for you. That's why I wrote Listar; I didn't want to hack Majordomo anymore, and Smartlist... well, let's just say that giant Procmail scripts as applications scare me more than giant Perl scripts do. ;) (Actually, as far as I'm concerned, all 'general' apps should be easily customizable and extendable - hence Listar's plugin architecture. But that's neither here nor there.) > > So, my PERSONAL opinion, between the two, is that I like Sympa better - > > largely because it's closer to my own philosophy of how a mailing list > > package should work, albeit with the one (to my mind) flaw of being > > written in Perl. > > thanks. My 30 minute quick-lookover leans in the same direction, but > I'd really love to run into folks who've used the servers and see how > they run in the real world, before I choose one to start kicking the > tires with... I've been a subscriber on lists using both; I tend to prefer Sympa over Mailman because I hate going to a website to tinker with subscription options. I've admin'd neither, though - my admin experience is only with LISTSERV, Majordomo, Smartlist (Bleah), and (of course) Listar. > And, FWIW, the python/perl thing bothers me, too. Gee, just what I > want to do -- learn yet another programming language.... (grin) *laugh* From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 16:07:31 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id PAA14861; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:50:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from plaidworks.com (plaidworks.com [209.239.169.200]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id PAA14851 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:49:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (a197.plaidworks.com [209.239.169.197] (may be forged)) by plaidworks.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA34220 ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:10:06 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:09:01 -0700 To: Jeremy Blackman , Chuq Von Rospach From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 3:25 PM -0700 10/11/99, Jeremy Blackman wrote: > However, one > of the problems with Majordomo is also that, for a high-traffic list, it's > re-parsing the whole program (which is NOT a trivially-sized Perl script) > for each post. Ouchie! But compared to the time spent queueing and delivering, it's still statistically insignificant. Bulk_mailer or whatever you use as your SMTP backend blows the recompilation out fo the water as far as overhead, and sendmail blows that out. you can do huge performance improvements simply by teaching the backend to directly write sendmail Queue files, and that'll buy you more than anything you could do to majordomo itself, other than the flat file problem. In fact, 95% of my problems are directly related to disk I/O issues -- disk I/O delays reading/writing subscriber files on the one side, and disk I/O in the sendmail queue(s) on the other side. Running 450 sendmails at once in a mail queue with a 5,000 or so batches in it -- you spend a lot of time locked up waiting for the directory inodes to free up. I've dealt with the latter, for right now, by simply using a ram disk. And the former by replacing the flat files with MySQL. perl being an interpretive language impacts the system less than running "top" does... (grin) > Often times, this may be the way to do it. I've found it may be easier to > write a custom app than make an existing one do things the way that works > best for you. Depends on what you're doing. For my Big Honking Listserver, it definitely does. For the smaller, more standard server, I want something off the shelf, and since I need to either upgrade to majordomo II or replace majordomo with something else, I've decided it's time to go back to square one and evaluate everything. I like the potential of majordomo II, but it just seems like they're trying to do things that sympa had months ago. Sympa seems more solid, further along the development path, and more solid/proven -- mj2 is still really being shaken out. (and yes, I'm part of the problem with mj2 -- watching instead of helping -- but a person only stretches so far...) > (Actually, as far as I'm concerned, all 'general' apps should be easily > customizable and extendable - hence Listar's plugin architecture. But > that's neither here nor there.) don't disagree a bit. A good, solid API is a good thing... > I've been a subscriber on lists using both; I tend to prefer Sympa over > Mailman because I hate going to a website to tinker with subscription > options. On the other hand, for the more naive and less-savvy internet users that my lists tend to attract, it's a godsend. I can't tell you how much mail I get from people who are scared to death by majordomo. it's nice to be able to do those things by e-mail, but the web is so endemic, I don't worry about that a bit any more. If I can only have one interface, I'll take web in a nanosecond. -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 16:37:36 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA15364; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:30:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from plaidworks.com (plaidworks.com [209.239.169.200]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id QAA15357 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:30:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from (a197.plaidworks.com [209.239.169.197] (may be forged)) by plaidworks.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA22696 ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:50:50 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <3802658A.CE33A1E6@encephalon.com> References: <3802658A.CE33A1E6@encephalon.com> Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:49:43 -0700 To: Steve Bergeon , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: Idiot of the hour Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 5:32 PM -0500 10/11/99, Steve Bergeon wrote: > Can any conclusions be drawn from this small sample? How about "you probably don't want to run experiments that use someone else's computer without getting their okay first, or at least warn them what's going to happen" Frankly, Steve, that's the ONLY thing I think you did wrong, whether or not the experiment was ill-conceived or not. And frankly, I think THAT's a fairly minor oopsie, but one that would almost never happen outside of the virtual worlds. it's more an indication that we haven't yet figured out how to handle the social dynamics of the network, because I don't think anyone would ever consider something like "well, I'm going to call every phone number in the 364- prefix and see how many people answer at 2AM and what their responses are", but it happens all of the time in the virtual world. And in both cases, you don't really have to ask permission first -- those are all "public/open" interfaces. But as you've found out, it's usually a lot less hassle to at least let people know, so they don't make basic assumptions about what you're doing that might or might not be correct. chuq -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 17:22:39 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id RAA15791; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:11:11 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp2.vnet.net (smtp2.vnet.net [166.82.1.32]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id RAA15782 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:11:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from katie.vnet.net (katie.vnet.net [166.82.1.7]) by smtp2.vnet.net (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA26943; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 20:30:14 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (murr@localhost) by katie.vnet.net (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA16464; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 20:30:13 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 20:30:13 -0400 (EDT) From: murr rhame To: Jeffrey Goldberg cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: > It is true that a number of lists that should be no-advertise > for outside Cranfield are infact advertised. I have been > cleaning up those. It is definitely worth your time to conceal any private lists. I screwed up the setup of one administrative list when I transfered to new software. Got several bogus $ubscribe requests every week until I corrected my error. - murr - From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 17:37:56 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id RAA15851; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:17:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp1.vnet.net (smtp1.vnet.net [166.82.1.31]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id RAA15844 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:17:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from katie.vnet.net (katie.vnet.net [166.82.1.7]) by smtp1.vnet.net (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA17540; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 20:36:19 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (murr@localhost) by katie.vnet.net (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA16787; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 20:36:18 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 20:36:18 -0400 (EDT) From: murr rhame To: Marc Haber cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Marc Haber wrote: > Is there any mailing list manager that will work with a stock > MTA (that rules out listproc as I believe listproc only runs > with qmail) that can be configured to include full headers of > the subscription request with the confirmation request > e-mail? The freeware version of Listproc will work with Sendmail and presumably any other standard MTA. It doesn't send full headers with subscribe requests but it does keep a full-header log of all command transactions. I'm not familiar with the features of the commercial version of Listproc. - murr - From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 19:54:16 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id TAA17328; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 19:34:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scifi.squawk.com (scifi.squawk.com [208.143.206.18]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id TAA17321 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 19:34:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from tpad.squawk.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by scifi.squawk.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id WAA16613; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 22:53:44 -0400 Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19991011215753.03622220@127.0.0.1> X-Sender: njs@127.0.0.1 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 21:57:53 -0400 To: Jeremy Blackman From: Nick Simicich Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? Cc: Chuq Von Rospach , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 02:33 PM 10/11/99 -0700, Jeremy Blackman wrote: >As I said, it's just one of my personal quirks that I don't like running >large-volume mailing lists as interpreted scripts. I watched someone run >a Majordomo list with 1900 users that got 80 posts a day, and it flattened >his machine... that was one of the reasons I decided to write Listar in C. >:) Let's think about this for a second. How does Majordomo work? The delivery path is....The MTA gets the message and processes it through a perl script, resend. The perl script processes in, (let's be real generous, here) at most five-six seconds of CPU (that is being pretty generous for resend) and then hands it back to the MTA at a different alias. At that point, the Perl script is *completely out of the process*. The MTA then expands the 1900 user list and does all of the delivery. [root@glock /root]# time /usr/lib/majordomo/wrapper resend -l turkey turkey-outgoing< /tmp/turkey-test 2.77user 0.08system 0:03.49elapsed 81%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k 0inputs+0outputs (496major+384minor)pagefaults 0swaps [root@glock /root]# I actually tried this several times - resend, on my pitiful P-100 that I do all of the majordomo stuff from pretty consistently runs in about the above times. Under three seconds, on a small test list. Would the time taken by resend be much larger on a list with 1600 users? The only thing that would be extended would be the time taken to insure that the user was a member of the list. Frankly, that is just not that much of Majordomo's admittedly bloated processing, but the loop is bad and complex. My measurement shows that the the total processing time (for a name that is not found in the first list, worst case) is entended to about 6 seconds on a 1600 member list. Generally, the poster would be found early and this would not take six seconds, let's just play the game with worst case numbers. So, let's extend this: If majordomo took 90*6 seconds of CPU to process those messages, that was 9 minutes out of 1440 minutes of the say. Assuming that the day was prime shift only, 8 hours, that was 1.9% of the time. Flattened? Yes, probably, but not by Majordomo. Let me guess, they were running sendmail, right? That was where, oh, probably 98.1% of the overhead was, and the entended times to deliver each message insured that this poor user had lots of copies of sendmail running, each working through an individual message. In other words, the fact that the list manager was written in an interpreted language had pretty much nothing to do with the flattening. If you decided not to write listar in an interpreted language to save processing overhead, you can save no more than the interpreted pieces use, which would seem to be about 2% of total prime shift time for your example case. Listar happens to fix the real bloat problem, Sendmail, by doing its own delivery. Using Postfix with Majordomo fixes that as well, by using a better delivery methodology. Frankly, I'd rather only have one delivery agent on my machine. But my point is that the machine was flattened by C code, not by Perl scripts. You can write bad code in many languages. You can write good code in many languages. And, of course, the excessive use of objects makes code written in any language bloated and bad. :-) In this case, the use of interpreted languages had nothing to do with the "flattening" of the machine. Last time I took a look at delivery statistics, Postfix had delivered 110,000 messages in a week, from that same P-100. And rc5des still gets more than 90% of the CPU. -- We will fight for bovine freedom, And hold our large heads high. We will run free, with the buffalo or die! Cows with Guns. - Dana Lyons, Cows With Guns Nick Simicich mailto:njs@scifi.squawk.com or (last choice) mailto:njs@us.ibm.com http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html -- Stop by and Light Up The World! From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 22:56:50 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id WAA22166; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 22:38:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from godai.maison-otaku.net (godai.maison-otaku.net [216.122.4.241]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id WAA22158 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 22:38:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (loki@localhost) by godai.maison-otaku.net (8.7.4/8.7.3) with ESMTP id WAA23470; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 22:57:28 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: godai.maison-otaku.net: loki owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 22:57:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeremy Blackman To: Nick Simicich cc: Chuq Von Rospach , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19991011215753.03622220@127.0.0.1> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Nick Simicich wrote: > At 02:33 PM 10/11/99 -0700, Jeremy Blackman wrote: > >As I said, it's just one of my personal quirks that I don't like running > >large-volume mailing lists as interpreted scripts. I watched someone run > >a Majordomo list with 1900 users that got 80 posts a day, and it flattened > >his machine... that was one of the reasons I decided to write Listar in C. > >:) > > Let's think about this for a second. How does Majordomo work? The > delivery path is....The MTA gets the message and processes it through a > perl script, resend. The perl script processes in, (let's be real > generous, here) at most five-six seconds of CPU (that is being pretty In his case, what was largely the problem was that his Perl was misconfigured and was trying to parse through a GREAT many more Perl libraries than was needed. Each invokation of resend took about 5 _minutes_. Believe me, I helped track down and fix the misconfiguration...it IS possible to do that. It is much HARDER to do something like that (misconfigure in such a way) under C. You are, however, correct that sendmail did not aid the situation. I will also admit I am biased against writing applications in scripting languages as a general rule, because I've seen some things done very, very wrong in them. I've seen some things done wrong in C as well, and I've seen some things done right in scripting languages, but as a general rule for some reason I feel more like daemons and such should be written in C or C++ or SOMETHING that compiles and produces a binary. When I see things on freshmeat like 'HTTP Daemon written in Perl' or 'MTA written in Perl' or 'FTP client written in shell scripting language', I just want to run screaming and hide under my desk. :) > Cows With Guns Good song. :) From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 23:20:43 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id XAA22502; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:09:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail10.svr.pol.co.uk (mail10.svr.pol.co.uk [195.92.193.214]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id XAA22495 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:09:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from modem-107.ibogaine.dialup.pol.co.uk ([62.136.72.235] helo=arpad.thegreen.private ident=exim) by mail10.svr.pol.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #2) id 11avNT-0001hp-00; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:25:40 +0100 Received: from cc047 (helo=localhost) by arpad.thegreen.private with local-esmtp (Exim 3.036 #1) id 11avNR-0005nd-00; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:25:37 +0100 Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:25:37 +0100 (BST) From: Jeffrey Goldberg X-Sender: cc047@arpad.thegreen.private Reply-To: Jeffrey Goldberg To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com (fwd) In-Reply-To: <17667.939665773@monkeys.com> Message-ID: Organization: Cranfield University Computer Centre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: > When it came right down to it, this fellow was somewhat less than entirely > specific regarding the nature and intent of his research: Yes, but the lack of any forger and the fully proper configuration of his site and domain helped. > P.S. As long as we are still talking about it (and given that this episode > makes it quite apparent that list admins may get their hackles raised by > any sort of automated subscribes/unsubscribes) allow me to pose the question > to the entire readership of this list: If someone sent you an E-mail (in > your capacity as list managers) asking for a list of, for example, the > envelope sender addresses used in outgoing traffic on/with your lists, > would you send that info back, or would you balk? It really depends on who it came from. It is possible that spammers might like to use big list envelope froms as their forged envelope from, Now, how do we determine who it came from and whether they are up to no good? Generally if their reply-address is on a website that is linked to by sites that I trust (say some known anti-spam sites), then I'll trust it and happily provide the information. One thing is that the query for some sites probably shouldn't go to the list owners but to the MLM owner. For example, instead of mailling 80 list owners at Cranfield, some of whom would simply not understand the question, it would be better to mail to majordomo-owner@cranfield.ac.uk. The trick is finding that address. Oh, all majorodmo based lists at Cranfield have envelope froms of owner-LISTNAME@Cranfield.ac.uk (the majordomo (and traditional) default) But over the next few months, I'll be introducing VERP and a special virtual domain maillists.cranfield.ac.uk. So all this will change. -j -- Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826 Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814 J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/ Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice. From list-managers-owner Mon Oct 11 23:35:19 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id XAA22471; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:07:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scifi.squawk.com (scifi.squawk.com [208.143.206.18]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id XAA22464 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:07:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from tpad.squawk.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by scifi.squawk.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id CAA22993; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 02:26:03 -0400 Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19991012022557.033a4b10@127.0.0.1> X-Sender: njs@127.0.0.1 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 02:25:57 -0400 To: Jeremy Blackman From: Nick Simicich Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-Reply-To: References: <3.0.5.32.19991011215753.03622220@127.0.0.1> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 10:57 PM 10/11/99 -0700, Jeremy Blackman wrote: >In his case, what was largely the problem was that his Perl was >misconfigured and was trying to parse through a GREAT many more Perl >libraries than was needed. Each invokation of resend took about 5 >_minutes_. Believe me, I helped track down and fix the >misconfiguration...it IS possible to do that. It is much HARDER to do >something like that (misconfigure in such a way) under C. No, in C, you will write something casual and a cracker will figure out how to cause a buffer overflow and wrest control of your system away from you over a distance :-). Being a security geek, I far prefer it when clients write programs in intermediate level scripting languages such as perl. Sorry, but the average C or C++ programmer can't handle the concept of safely flattening an object into a structure, or even reading a string from an external source. Any language with self sizing strings is a tremendous improvement, security wise. However, there are pathological cases of this sort all of the time. Five minutes to invoke a Perl script? I'd call that pathological and probably not worth considering as part of an evaluation. I'd also not blame the scripting language for a configuration that bad. >You are, however, correct that sendmail did not aid the situation. > >I will also admit I am biased against writing applications in scripting >languages as a general rule, because I've seen some things done very, very >wrong in them. I've seen some things done wrong in C as well, and I've >seen some things done right in scripting languages, but as a general rule >for some reason I feel more like daemons and such should be written in C >or C++ or SOMETHING that compiles and produces a binary. >From a security standpoint, I think you've been proven wrong over and over again. >When I see things on freshmeat like 'HTTP Daemon written in Perl' or 'MTA >written in Perl' or 'FTP client written in shell scripting language', I >just want to run screaming and hide under my desk. :) Sometimes things are done as interesting exercises, like the (very old) attempt to prove that vi was as "powerful" as emacs by writing a turing machine in vi. But sometimes things are reasonable to do. I still assert that the scriptable portion of MLM's structured like majordomo is not only both reasonable, but more likely to be extensible and secure than the equivalent C Code. The general rule of thumb I've used before is that if it was possible to easily enumerate the number of times something was going to happen through circumstance, it was reasonable to write a script to do it. If it was hard to enumerate but still driven by circumstance, it was probably OK to write in an object oriented language. If it was damn near impossible to enumerate because it happened so often or extremely easy to enumerate because it happened on a continuous basis, it probably had to be in C or assembler, with no objects. >> Cows With Guns > >Good song. :) It is a song? I can hear the gunfire from my windows now.. -- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat? Nick Simicich mailto:njs@scifi.squawk.com http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html -- Stop by and Light Up The World! From list-managers-owner Tue Oct 12 00:50:19 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id AAA23556; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 00:39:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from newmail.spectraweb.ch (newmail.spectraweb.ch [194.158.230.44]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id AAA23531 for ; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 00:39:32 -0700 (PDT) From: nb@thinkcoach.com Received: from quill.thinkcoach.com (194.230.192.111) by newmail.spectraweb.ch; 12 Oct 1999 09:55:12 +0200 Received: (from norbert@localhost) by quill.thinkcoach.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id HAA06984; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:03:14 +0200 Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:03:14 +0200 Message-Id: <199910120503.HAA06984@quill.thinkcoach.com> X-Authentication-Warning: quill.thinkcoach.com: norbert set sender to Norbert Bollow using -f Prefer-Language: de, en, fr To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-reply-to: <17667.939665773@monkeys.com> (rfg@monkeys.com) Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com (fwd) References: <17667.939665773@monkeys.com> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Ronald F. Guilmette writes: > to the entire readership of this list: If someone sent you an E-mail (in > your capacity as list managers) asking for a list of, for example, the > envelope sender addresses used in outgoing traffic on/with your lists, > would you send that info back, or would you balk? If the request comes from someone whose name is familiar to me, and whom I know to have strong anti-spam attitudes, and if it comes at a moment when I have some spare time, then I would honor the request. Under any other circumstances I would delete the request without even reading it to the end, for the simple reason that the only way to reach my goals is to avoid working for the goals of everyone else all the time. May blessings from the eternal God surprise and overtake you! Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow, Coach http://thinkcoach.com Backup email: nb@pobox.com From list-managers-owner Tue Oct 12 01:20:57 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id AAA23557; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 00:39:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from newmail.spectraweb.ch (newmail.spectraweb.ch [194.158.230.44]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id AAA23534 for ; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 00:39:34 -0700 (PDT) From: nb@thinkcoach.com Received: from quill.thinkcoach.com (194.230.192.111) by newmail.spectraweb.ch; 12 Oct 1999 09:55:15 +0200 Received: (from norbert@localhost) by quill.thinkcoach.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id HAA07010; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:18:42 +0200 Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:18:42 +0200 Message-Id: <199910120518.HAA07010@quill.thinkcoach.com> X-Authentication-Warning: quill.thinkcoach.com: norbert set sender to Norbert Bollow using -f Prefer-Language: de, en, fr To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-reply-to: (message from Chuq Von Rospach on Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:09:01 -0700) Subject: Re: Sympa? mailman? References: Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > At 3:25 PM -0700 10/11/99, Jeremy Blackman wrote: > > However, one > > of the problems with Majordomo is also that, for a high-traffic list, it's > > re-parsing the whole program (which is NOT a trivially-sized Perl script) > > for each post. Ouchie! > > But compared to the time spent queueing and delivering, it's still > statistically insignificant. Bulk_mailer or whatever you use as your > SMTP backend blows the recompilation out fo the water as far as > overhead, and sendmail blows that out. you can do huge performance > improvements simply by teaching the backend to directly write > sendmail Queue files, and that'll buy you more than anything you > could do to majordomo itself, other than the flat file problem. It should be noted that all the architectureal shortcomings of Majordomo 1.x which have been pointed out in this thread so far are solved in Majordomo 2. May blessings from the eternal God surprise and overtake you! Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow, Coach http://thinkcoach.com Backup email: nb@pobox.com > > In fact, 95% of my problems are directly related to disk I/O issues > -- disk I/O delays reading/writing subscriber files on the one side, > and disk I/O in the sendmail queue(s) on the other side. Running 450 > sendmails at once in a mail queue with a 5,000 or so batches in it -- > you spend a lot of time locked up waiting for the directory inodes to > free up. I've dealt with the latter, for right now, by simply using a > ram disk. And the former by replacing the flat files with MySQL. perl > being an interpretive language impacts the system less than running > "top" does... > > (grin) > > > Often times, this may be the way to do it. I've found it may be easier to > > write a custom app than make an existing one do things the way that works > > best for you. > > Depends on what you're doing. For my Big Honking Listserver, it > definitely does. For the smaller, more standard server, I want > something off the shelf, and since I need to either upgrade to > majordomo II or replace majordomo with something else, I've decided > it's time to go back to square one and evaluate everything. I like > the potential of majordomo II, but it just seems like they're trying > to do things that sympa had months ago. Sympa seems more solid, > further along the development path, and more solid/proven -- mj2 is > still really being shaken out. > > (and yes, I'm part of the problem with mj2 -- watching instead of > helping -- but a person only stretches so far...) > > > (Actually, as far as I'm concerned, all 'general' apps should be easily > > customizable and extendable - hence Listar's plugin architecture. But > > that's neither here nor there.) > > don't disagree a bit. A good, solid API is a good thing... > > > I've been a subscriber on lists using both; I tend to prefer Sympa over > > Mailman because I hate going to a website to tinker with subscription > > options. > > On the other hand, for the more naive and less-savvy internet users > that my lists tend to attract, it's a godsend. I can't tell you how > much mail I get from people who are scared to death by majordomo. > it's nice to be able to do those things by e-mail, but the web is so > endemic, I don't worry about that a bit any more. If I can only have > one interface, I'll take web in a nanosecond. > > -- > Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) > Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) > From list-managers-owner Tue Oct 12 05:22:49 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id FAA29265; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 05:07:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from cranium.encephalon.com (cranium.encephalon.com [208.246.217.212]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id FAA29258 for ; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 05:07:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from encephalon.com (cranium.encephalon.com [208.246.217.212]) by cranium.encephalon.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA21962; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:26:33 -0500 Message-ID: <380329BC.69B8926B@encephalon.com> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 07:29:49 -0500 From: Steve Bergeon X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Chuq Von Rospach CC: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Idiot of the hour References: <3802658A.CE33A1E6@encephalon.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk You can't get mail without other someone else's computer. Mail lists, when open, are designed to allow limited use of those computers. This is a public service, open to all 24 hours a day seven days a week. Using a telephone as Chuq suggests would require direct human intervention to get the dang thing to stop ringing. It would seem odd to compare that with automatically answered email systems. Or maybe many people have the list management messages sent to their pagers? Forcing somebody out of bed at 3am is nothing like sending a message (or many) to their computer. In fact my computers have been accepting mail for this list all night quite nicely while I sleep comfortably. Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > > At 5:32 PM -0500 10/11/99, Steve Bergeon wrote: > > Can any conclusions be drawn from this small sample? > > How about "you probably don't want to run experiments that use > someone else's computer without getting their okay first, or at least > warn them what's going to happen" > > Frankly, Steve, that's the ONLY thing I think you did wrong, whether > or not the experiment was ill-conceived or not. And frankly, I think > THAT's a fairly minor oopsie, but one that would almost never happen > outside of the virtual worlds. it's more an indication that we > haven't yet figured out how to handle the social dynamics of the > network, because I don't think anyone would ever consider something > like "well, I'm going to call every phone number in the 364- prefix > and see how many people answer at 2AM and what their responses are", > but it happens all of the time in the virtual world. > > And in both cases, you don't really have to ask permission first -- > those are all "public/open" interfaces. But as you've found out, it's > usually a lot less hassle to at least let people know, so they don't > make basic assumptions about what you're doing that might or might > not be correct. > > chuq > -- > Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) > Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) From list-managers-owner Tue Oct 12 06:23:17 1999 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id GAA29865; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 06:04:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from crow.a001.sprintmail.com (crow.prod.itd.earthlink.net [209.178.63.7]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id GAA29858 for ; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 06:04:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rachel (sdn-ar-005waseatP241.dialsprint.net [168.191.239.3]) by crow.a001.sprintmail.com (8.8.7/8.8.5) with SMTP id GAA13895; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 06:23:40 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <003601bf14b4$d6084c00$03efbfa8@rachel> Reply-To: "Chris McEwen" From: "Chris McEwen" To: , "Ronald F. Guilmette" References: <17667.939665773@monkeys.com> Subject: Re: Cranfield.ac.uk now blocking mail from encephalon.com (fwd) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 06:22:29 -0700 Organization: Socrates Press, Keyport WA MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk First of all, I would think there are better wa