newspostuser --> To, but what about Reply-To?

Ken Murchison ken at oceana.com
Tue Feb 17 13:14:13 EST 2004


+archive.info-cyrus at utdallas.edu wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, Ken Murchison wrote:
> 
> 
>>I just committed this change to CVS.  It seems to work just fine with
>>Mozilla, Outlook and Pine.
>>
>>It also gave me the opportunity to cleanup the handling of netnews
>>specific headers (Path, Xref) and to actually append the post addresses
>>to the Reply-To header (previously I was just adding another To: header).
> 
> 
> Excellent!  Thanks!

Well, I just found a problem with this.  It also may have been a problem 
with the To: header as well.

Any article which gets posted to Cyrus nntpd will have the post address 
added to the Reply-To header, and this address will be present in the 
article when it is transferred to the outside news peer.

The problem occurs when the spammers harvest this address and then start 
sending junk/viruses to the post address.  In my case my virus scanner 
catches and strips the virus, and continues to deliver the message to 
the intended recipient (the newsgroup via lmtp2nntp) which then gets 
propagated up the tree.  The end result is that I have been sending 
virus notifications to comp.mail.imap for the past day or so (until Rob 
notified me).

Obviously, I have to configure my MTA so that it only accepts mail to 
the post addresses from internal/auth'd clients, but nntpd should 
probably also cleanse the article of the post address.

Thoughts?

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
---
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