[Sysadmin] (Fwd) Undeliverable Mail

[Dean Mah]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 04:17:21PM -0000, William Anderson wrote:
> Dean Mah wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> > I believe that the 'address subbed to thelist' is passed to the MTA
> > along with a list of other ones.  The MTA goes through the list and
> > e-mails the addresses individually.
>
> it does
>
> > I believe that the 'final recipient' is handled by the receiver's MTA.
> > If the receiver's uses aliases, .forward, procmail, etc., their local
> > MTA will rewrite the header and send it to the final recipient.
>
> sounds fair
>
> > So I think that our MTA has to write the 'address subbed to the list'
> > into the headers.
>
> or Mailman, which seems the more logical place to do it, as long as that
> handler that's bunging in X-evolt and X-MajorGumbo headers can be made aware
> of an individual email address at that stage, or does it bung the same
> headers in each email sent out as a batch, e.g. is it
>
>   - Joe sends a mail to thelist
>   - mailman receives it, munges it, adds unique headers to each and every
>     mail as it's sent out to recipients (X-evolt in particular)
>   - Bob receives a mail from thelist with a different X-evolt header from
>     Joe, Susan, Pete and Cathy
>
> or is it
>
>   - Joe sends a mail to the list
>   - mailman receives it, munges it, adds some headers, and sends copies
>     of that one mail to recipients
>   - Bob receives a mail from thelist with the same X-evolt headers as
>     everyone else
>
> I hope you see what i'm getting at here - if it's the former, great, Mailman
> can handle bunging in the subscriber's address into the headers for us to
> use for tracing.  If it's the latter, Mailman doesn't have a scoob at that
> point, and it would then be up to the MTA to munge in some custom headers,
> that would then possibly affect meo mails too.

Okay, gotcha.  Have you taken a look at how the X-evolt is handled?  I
guess I'll try looking into the archive versus my local copy of the
e-mail.  If you do the same comparison, we can have a limited guess as
to which way mailman is doing it.

Dean