[time-nuts] More on the weird stuff at the top of messages

John Ackermann N8UR jra at febo.com
Sat Jun 30 08:49:45 EDT 2007


The two lines that are being added to the top of time-nuts messages are
coming from some sort of interaction between four separate parts of the
mail handling system here; I did a system software update yesterday and
something broke.

One of the two lines seems to be part of what is normally logged during
message processing, while the other (the "Errors-to" line) is a header
that would normally be in the message, but not displayed in the body.

I've done a google search and haven't come up with any reference to this
problem, and frankly because of the number of programs involved (at
least Exim4, Mailman, and SA-Exim) tracking down just what's going on is
likely to be beyond my abilities, or at least the time I can spend on
figuring it out.

As far as I can tell, the email address in the "Errors-to" line is the
address of the specific recipient of the message, and not someone else's
(in other words, your copy of the message will include your address,
while mine will include my address).  So, there isn't a privacy issue.

However, if you reply to a previous message, that header will by default
be in the quoted original text and will expose your email address.  So,
it would be best to look for and if necessary delete those two lines
from any reply where you quote an earlier message.

I'll keep an eye on the available updates and hopefully there will be a
fix for this problem Real Soon Now.  (I'm running Debian unstable on the
mail server, and updates occur very frequently.)

Sorry again for any inconvenience this is causing.

John




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