Forum always sends notification twice (one with SpamAssasin)

[Marc-Andre.Roberge@mus.ul]

I would like to draw the attention of the forum's administrators to the fact that notification of a reply is always done by means of two messages. The first one is addressed to the user, the second has nothing in the "To:" line. It contains a SpamAssassin report following the contents of the first message, as follows:

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SPAM: -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results ----------------------
SPAM: This mail is probably spam.  The original message has been altered
SPAM: so you can recognise or block similar unwanted mail in future.
SPAM: See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details.
SPAM: 
SPAM: Content analysis details:   (6.8 hits, 5 required)
SPAM: TO_EMPTY           (1.4 points)  To: is empty
SPAM: TO_MALFORMED       (1.1 points)  To: has a malformed address
SPAM: NO_REAL_NAME       (0.5 points)  From: does not include a real name
SPAM: EXCUSE_1           (2.3 points)  BODY: Gives a lame excuse about why you were sent this SPAM
SPAM: SUPERLONG_LINE     (0.4 points)  BODY: Contains a line >=199 characters long
SPAM: MISSING_HEADERS    (1.1 points)  Missing To: header
SPAM: 
SPAM: -------------------- End of SpamAssassin results ---------------------

I am not aware that our university server is filtering incoming mail with SpamAssassin.

Furthermore, the header contains the following lines:

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X-Mailer: PHP
X-MimeOLE: Produced By phpBB2
X-Spam-Score: 6.8 (******) TO_EMPTY,TO_MALFORMED,NO_REAL_NAME,EXCUSE_1,SUPERLONG_LINE,MISSING_HEADERS
X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.16 (www . roaringpenguin . com / mimedefang)

Finally, it seems that the subject line is limited to 53 characters. Would it be possible to make this longer? I am sure that it would help people provide a fuller description of their problem.

[John]

The notification is actually sent once, not twice. We have nothing to do with SpamAssassin, as it is on the inbound side of things (i.e., your ISP). For some reason some folks are getting 2 copies, others are not. Again, it has nothing to do with the Forum.

[Andy]

You know, It is the forum that is causing this problem.

I upgraded the forum software a couple of weeks ago and this is when the problems started. It seems that the forum developers have added some Sendmail fixes and this has now busted a few other things.

All mail is now sent from the forum to Undisclosed Recipients the reason for this is so that peoples names and email addresses are not sent out in the reply email. This I can see makes sense, privacy at the moment is a major concern for all and with the state of viruses and worms floating around at the moment anything that helps is welcome.

However, we run Spam Assasin as well as MIME Defang on the milonic server. ALL emails with attachments other than .zip .txt and .js are blocked at the front door, but mail without attachments that appears to be SPAM will be flagged as such and a Spamassasin tag added, some get through, some do not, it just depends on the severity of the email.

At Milonic, we have no other choice but to drop suspect emails. I can watch the mail log file grow at an astonishing rate and see emails coming through at a rate of about 1 every 4-5 seconds. The math on this equates to around 20,000 emails per day, most of which is unsolicited.

I'm not sure why you are get the Spamassasin message. It appears the email is being delivered in a strange way now. I will look into it and see what can be done.

Cheers
Andy

[John]

Didn't realize you were running your own mail server, Andy.

However, I remain confused. I thought SA only worked on incoming messages (why would you want to trap your own outgoing stuff?). So, how is it getting attached to the outgoing mails?

[fredlongworthhighschool]

Yeah, I'm getting the two emails too. The SPAM one usually arrives before the normal one!