VERPing and Personalization (was Re: [TriLUG] Iptables help)

[Tanner Lovelace]

Jeremy Portzer said the following on 3/24/04 1:47 PM:

> On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 12:23, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> 
> 
>>I think I've got the bounce stuff fixed now, and I did turn on
>>VERPing each individual message for a bit to see if that worked.
>>It does, but it slows down delivery a bit since it can't batch
>>send messages.  Also, someone (Magnus?) suggested on irc that
>>VERPing the individual messages could mess up some black/white/gray
>>listing setups.  I'm less concerned with that than I am about
>>the possiblities for VERP to help us control bouncing accounts,
>>but I wanted to discuss it here first.  So, at the moment, I've
>>set mailman to VERP password reminders and confirmations but not
>>individual messages.  List owners can turn that on if they want,
>>though.
> 
> 
> What Magnus was referring to is the ability with some list managers,
> just as djb's EZLM, to set up VERP where every single message has a
> different identifier.  So messages from trilug might have an envelope
> sender of something like,
> "trilug-message-34233-jeremyp=pobox.com at trilug.org" (made up syntax, but
> you get the idea).  This causes problems with "graylist" spam detection
> (called auto-whitelist in SpamAssassin) that might keep track of things
> based on envelope sender.  It isn't a problem if the envelope sender is
> the same thing for each message, which is how mailman does it.  So we
> shouldn't need to worry if we enable VERP for normal postings in
> mailman.
> 
> 
> --Jeremy
> 
> 

Good description Jeremy, but let's deal with non made up examples.
Here's an the Sender header from a message I sent while
mailman's "Personalization" was turned on:

Sender: trilug-bounces+lovelace=wayfarer.org at trilug.org

Here is the Sender header from your message (with mailman's
"Personalization" turned off):

Sender: trilug-bounces at trilug.org

So, it looks like to me that yes, it is changing the sender header
and it will affect things like Mangus is talking about.  What am
I missing here?  Is it the fact that the sender will still be the
same for all messages to a given subscriber even though it includes
the e-mail address of the recepient in it? (i.e. mailman can use
VERP to figure out who's bouncing, but not which message bounced?)

Cheers,
Tanner

-- 
Tanner Lovelace       | Don't move! Or I'll fill ya full of... little
lovelace at wayfarer.org | yellow bolts of light! - Commander John Crichton