Older blog entries for cord (starting at number 31)

Today i kicked 560 Mailaddresses off lists.debian.org ...

... because they are bouncing.

In my ongoing attempt to investigate and fix problems of our mailinglist-server, i found that we only had a working bounce-detection for lists starting debian-* minus debian-private and the three digest-lists.

So i rewrote some parts of the bounce detection:

We now have four categories of lists:

• high (30 or more mails a day)
• medium (20 or more mails a week)
• low (10 or more mails a month)
• very-low (the rest)

for these four categories we calculate a spam-rate depending on the number of distributed messages and the number of bounces in the timerange of 24 hours for 'high' lists, 7 days for 'medium' lists, 30 days for 'low' lists and 90 days for 'very-low' lists.

If the Spamrate exceeds 80% for unmoderated, and 60% for moderated lists, and bounces have been seen for more than 24 hours we kick. (these rates are subject to change, when we have implemented the warning mechanism)

So these changes implemented a bounce-detection for debian-changes-digest and today we reached the level of 60% bounces for more than 500 subscribers.

So what next?

To finish the bounce-detection, i want to implement something which tries to notify subscribers about bouncing mails. This is useless for 'hard'-bouncers, but people with some smaller problems like mail2news-gatewayers this could be helpful. I also want to implement something which sends out unsubscription notices for three weeks after the kick, so kicked out people can resubscribe after they have sorted out the problems.

Both should fire once a week per address.

What do you think?

Syndicated 2008-01-25 23:11:37 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

Debian Lists vs. Mail2News-Gateways.

While analysing the pole setters in our internal bouncers-Hitlist i found that some of them run a mail2news-Gateway.

The problem is: our Mailinglists leave Mail-Headers mostly untouched, and so headers like X-Trace or X-Complaints-To are passed through without modifications.

If a mail containing those headers is handed over to inews (as in INN) it rejects it, and the bounce comes back to us:

<XXXXX@XXX.com>: Command died with status 1: "/usr/bin/maildrop". Command
output: inews: cannot send article to server: 441 Can't set system
"X-Complaints-To" header inews: article not posted

so people: fix your systems. if you do more with listmail than dropping it somewhere make sure that the bounces your system produces go to someone who can fix it. We (as in listmasters) normally simply unsubscribe those.

btw: we talk about 18181 bounces since 08.2004 in this case.

Syndicated 2008-01-14 09:09:06 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

Precedence-Mail-Headers?

I'm just wadeing through Debian-Mailinglists on the search for enhancements and false-positives.

and i just came over debian-security-announce, a lists that sends a helpful message back to submitters that aren't allowed to send out advisories.

That message didn't contain a Precedence-Header so i added one, and wondered which value would be appropriate... I remember to have seen three values: 'junk', 'bulk' and 'list' (the latter should be set for all our Mailinglists).

So i tried the usual ways to find out about some more possible values, but i couldn't find a RfC or another Document that describes correct usage of the Precedence-Header.

So, i set the Header to 'junk' now, but if someone could point me to some documentation i would be thankful.

Syndicated 2008-01-02 19:16:11 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

Happy New Year, it's 1984 in Germany

http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/

Syndicated 2007-12-31 23:00:00 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

Scratchbox: You must close your other scratchbox sessions first

after playing around a little bit with maemo inside scratchbox, i managed to break the packetsystem beyond repair... so i wanted to start again, but the maemo-sdk-install_4.0.sh told me:

E: You must close your other scratchbox sessions first

so... where to go from here?

http://mg.pov.lt/maemo-irclog/%23maemo. ... 0.log.html knows it:

sb-conf killall

are the magic words. lets start again.

Syndicated 2007-11-10 21:22:40 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

Scratchbox: Inconsistency detected by ld.so

As i blogged before i'm going to be the happy (?) owner of a Nokia N810. On this device runs a Linux with a special distribution and there is also a Development SDK, which can be run on ia32-machines.

This SDK relies on Scratchbox, so i just downloaded and tried to install it. This works smoothly, they provide a shellscript, which downloads all needed components and feeds them to dpkg.

But, when i try to start Scratchbox i get

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso' failed!

after some g00gleing, i finally found the solution here: [Scratchbox-users] Re: scratchbox doesn't works any more.

and the answer is: The kernel needs VDSO. This option is in Linux-Kernel-menuconfig in the 'Processor type and features' submenu.

The help on that item shows:

Say N here if you are running a sufficiently recent glibc version (2.3.3 or later), to remove the high-mapped VDSO mapping and to exclusively use the randomized VDSO.

and so i switched it off. Ok, with on again now, lets find the next obstacle.

Syndicated 2007-11-10 08:11:23 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

N810 maemo submission accepted

Yes, I just received the following mail:

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

maemo team - http://maemo.org

So christmas is saved.

Syndicated 2007-11-09 18:02:51 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

RIP Telekommunikationsgeheimnis.

Explaination for non German Readers: Today the german parliament passed an act, which orders all communication-connection data (caller-ids, times, email-communication, other internet-transactions) have to be stored for 6 months.

More info on vorratsdatenspeicherung.de

Syndicated 2007-11-09 13:59:55 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

mutt: autoviewing text/html

it sometimes funny, i'm working with mutt since about 10years, (the 5years before i was using elm) and just found out how i can view pure text/html-Mails without fiddeling with piping and things.

set implicit_autoview

in .muttrc does the trick.

but now mutt also prefers the text/html-part of multipart/alternative-mails, this is going to far for me. i want the text/plain-part if available. mutt has also a solution here:

alternative_order text/plain text/html

and done. no more piping to html2text. One day i'll read through the whole manual again...

Syndicated 2007-11-03 13:17:19 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

sendmail uses ident be default

I have no idea how the other major MTAs handle this, but sendmail seems to issue an ident-auth-request on each connect it gets.

As i think this is rather useless, as most hosts don't answer it, and, even if they would, the answer is easily fakeable, i switched it off.

adding

define(`confTO_IDENT', `0')dnl

to /etc/mail/sendmail.mc disables this. Sadly this isn't documented, for confTO_IDENT it only states

The timeout waiting for a response to an IDENT query.

thanks goes to http://sial.org/howto/sendmail/tips/

Syndicated 2007-09-29 12:52:16 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan