FreeBSD Mailing List
Jeffrey Goldberg
jeffrey at goldmark.org
Tue Jun 12 13:31:35 UTC 2007
[I'm cc'ing this to owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org and
mailman at 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 at one.of.your.clients gets automatically copied to you, then
it is more than possible that postmaster at 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/
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