Per http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12655 ...
On our newer, Ubuntu-based Apache configuration we've been using sSMTP as a minimal local SMTP sending agent. This emulates the 'sendmail' binary and simply passes messages off to a hub server with no local queuing... but it's not without its problems.
sSMTP forces the message's 'From' header and the SMTP envelope sender address to be the same, which causes some problems for us when that 'From' address is a user's offsite e-mail:
* Servers which validate SPF records may reject the messages outright
* In case of delivery problems, bounce messages will be sent back to the user, possibly including the recipient's address which is supposed to be kept private.
As a workaround for such configurations I've introduced a config var $wgUserEmailUseReplyTo. When set, a wiki-specific address is used as 'From', and the user's address is put in 'Reply-To'.
This is uglier -- you don't see a clean 'Sender' column in your mail client -- but mails will get through and private data won't get tossed around inappropriately.
In the long term I'd like to see us either dump sSMTP (a local-only postfix or something would work fine) or patch it to let the envelope sender be set separately.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
On 21/01/2008, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Per http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12655 ...
[...]
- In case of delivery problems, bounce messages will be sent back to the
user, possibly including the recipient's address which is supposed to be kept private.
As a workaround for such configurations I've introduced a config var $wgUserEmailUseReplyTo. When set, a wiki-specific address is used as 'From', and the user's address is put in 'Reply-To'.
This is uglier -- you don't see a clean 'Sender' column in your mail client -- but mails will get through and private data won't get tossed around inappropriately.
Brion, thank you for finding a fix for this severe bug. Could you please clarify for the technically less advanced (i. e. me), if your workaround is already installed in all wikimedia-projects of if there are further steps to be taken in order to fix this bug on all wikis?
Best regards
Hei ber
Hei Ber wrote:
Brion, thank you for finding a fix for this severe bug. Could you please clarify for the technically less advanced (i. e. me), if your workaround is already installed in all wikimedia-projects of if there are further steps to be taken in order to fix this bug on all wikis?
Yes, it's set sitewide.
Mark's looking to see if he can easily adjust our hub mailer (running on exim) to override the envelope sender for mails sent from MediaWiki. (They're all marked with an X-Mailer header, making them easy to filter). This will allow us to switch back to putting user addres in the 'From' line safely.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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