Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 08:31:24 -0500 From: Jeffrey Goldberg <jeffrey@goldmark.org> To: Graham Potts <graham.potts@americangolf.co.uk> Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org List" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>, owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Mailing List Message-ID: <8945500B-A730-477F-A232-16C9AE54344A@goldmark.org> In-Reply-To: <002201c7acec$870a3180$1902a8c0@agnet.local> References: <002201c7acec$870a3180$1902a8c0@agnet.local>
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--Apple-Mail-1--663054055 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed [I'm cc'ing this to owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org and mailman@freebsd.org in the hopes that someone involved in managing the list will help investigate] On Jun 12, 2007, at 7:23 AM, Graham Potts wrote: > I seem to be having trouble with spam from your email servers - I > have been > receiving emails from your mailing list for some time now. The > problem is > that I do not want them, nor have I ever asked for them. I'm just a member of the mailing list and have no access to mail system set up. But I do run mailman lists of my own (on my own servers), so I hope that I can be of some help. First of all what you describe "shouldn't happen". That is no comfort to you who see it happening, but the mailing list system is designed to prevent exactly what you describe. However, you are not the first person to report this happening to them in recent months. Indeed, for reasons unknown the freebsd.org mailing list server has gotten itself onto a blacklist, and the kind of problem you report may be the reason. The way the subscription process is supposed to work is that a confirmation request is sent to the address being subscribed. The confirmation request contains a unique token. The person who receives that confirmation request must respond to it (either by following a particular web link or by replying to the confirmation request email) before they will be added to the list. Here is some wild speculation about what might be the cause of the problem. (1) You did positively respond to a confirmation request, but just don't recall doing so. Note that if you have email addresses which forwards to your address it may have been that address which was subscribed. Note: > Despite sending 4 > requests to the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the emails, I am > STILL > receiving them! The fact that the normal unsubscribe process is failing for you suggests that the subscribed address is not the one that you normally send mail from, but one that forwards to you. I see from your .sig that you are an IT consultant. If mail to say, postmaster@one.of.your.clients gets automatically copied to you, then it is more than possible that postmaster@one.of.your.clients subscribed to the list at some point. So my first suggestion is to try to figure out what address is actually subscribed that is getting to you. There are two ways to do this. One is to look at the monthly subscription reminders. Each month, each individual subscribed address should get an individualized subscription reminder. That will contain what address is actually subscribed. Chances are you haven't saved any of those, and I doubt that you would want to wait until 1 July to get things sorted out. The second method is by studying the full headers of mail that is sent to you via the list. If you are not familiar with examining full headers, please ask for more help from either me personally or from the list. There are other things that could cause the problem. Most involve either some misconfiguration of the mailing list system or a security breach. (Mailman uses some pretty low security systems). But before exploring those, it makes most sense to first figure out which address is really subscribed (which is information that will be needed to unsubscribe you whether done by you or by the list administrators). Also, could you let us know when you first started getting mail to the list? That might also help pinpoint the problem. -j -- Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/ --Apple-Mail-1--663054055--
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