Unless you care about the Realtime Blackhole List, Mailman or backup drive recovery - skip this.
------ On March 1, I was told my mail was not reaching a friend because I was on the Realtime Blackhole List. Contacting mail-abuse.org, I was given a text box to explain why I was spamming and when will I stop ... not helpful. After three more attempts to get information from a Real Human Being, I was finally sent the redacted complaint. The complaint related to the Divish mailing list and the offending email was sent: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 11:48:43 +0000 I keep mail logs on the dirvish backup drive - in fact, mail logs are a non-trivial fraction of those backup drives, because I get more than one spam per second. A spam in the United States is a $300 tort, so in theory I should be earning $150 billion dollars per year in court :-) but I digress. That backup drive (timespan 2015-03 to 2016-01) was in storage. Retrieving it and loading it into a swap cage on my server - failed! I did not have time to debug it until today; dirty contacts on the swap cage, apparently. Rebooting the server with the back drive connected directly to a spare SATA port, it mounted fine, I found the backup from the morning of 2015 Aug 12, and the outbound mail, and the mail that triggered it. I have graylisting turned on, so I received the offending mail twice, from 46.152.226.46, part of an address block belonging to mobily.com.sa in Saudi Arabia. That was not one of our 180+ list members, so Mailman sent back a bounce message. However, Mailman doesn't know the originating IP address, just the return address, which was b#@s#.com, and so the bounce message was sent there, containing something b# or her mailbot found offensive. Helpful behavior in a civilized world; in the spamiverse an open relay for the persistent. I changed the Mailman configuration line "Send mail to poster when their posting is held for approval" to NO. If you accidentally post to the dirvish list from the wrong account, too bad. When I get my $150B from the spam courts, I will gladly send b# $10M of that for her trouble and pain. :-) BTW, I never received the approval request email (nothing in the logs), nor a complaint from "mail-abuse.org" as they claim. So that remains a mystery. Lessons learned: 0) Keep mail log backups forever. 1) Swap cages are unreliable. Of course, so is plugging and unplugging SATA cables into motherboards. 2) Turn OFF "Send mail to poster ... " on Mailman 3) RBL is sloppy. 4) Never assume ANYONE using the dirvish mailing list would rat me out to RBL; such a swell bunch of ladies and gentlemen and AIs are only here to help each other! Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
