Re: TECH: rejected spam postings -- is it me?

On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 11:57:49 +0100, taliesin the storyteller
<taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:
> * Danny Wier said on 2004-10-31 10:48:27 +0100
> > About once per day I'm getting "Rejected posting" e-mails from our Listserv
> > saying "You are not authorized to send mail to the CONLANG list from your
> > account", followed by header information, and then various types of spam. Is
> > it just me or is anyone/everyone else getting these?
>
> I'm getting them, and (gasp!) deleting them. The weird thing is though,
> when I forget and use the wrong from-adress, I get such a "rejected
> posting"-mail, but only to *me*, so how come this spam is still sent
> through the list?
I'm getting them, too.

The thing is, the rejection notice *is* only sent to the "sender" -
but the spammer forged the list's address as sender.

The technical details were explained on this list at some point, but
if I remember correctly, they go something like this: the list
address, conlang@listserv.brown.edu, is not permitted to send mail to
the list, so if a spammer forges that as from address, it'll be
bounced with "you're not a member or maybe you got your address
wrong". The bounce will be sent to the "sender",
conlang@listserv.brown.edu (i.e. the list submission address) -- and
it so happens that the address which is used in the From field of
bounces *is* permitted to send email to the list (for arcane technical
reasons, I believe, involving the necessity of occasionally sending
administrative mail or the like). So the bounce is accepted by the
mailing list software (since the sender -- the generator of the bounce
-- is a member of the CONLANG list and had posting access) and is
distributed to all other members.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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