[Techtalk] Majordomo help requested

Terri Oda terri at zone12.com
Mon Apr 29 14:21:47 EST 2002


At 08:43 AM 29/04/02 -0700, Lynn Kuhlman wrote:
>One of the lists I administer got spammed this weekend. I looked at the
>config file and the restrict_post was set to only allow list members to
>post. I'm wondering if the setting never took. Does anyone know what the
>name of the file is and an idea of where to look for it? I want to
>manually edit it to add the entry if I need to. I did try and update the
>config file but I have no way of checking it is working without spamming
>the list again.

I think the config file is the only file you can look at (listname.config 
in ~majordomo/lists/) unless you want to read through the perl of majordomo 
(a fun exercise, but probably not what you want to do)... :)  You said you 
looked at that, though -- did you have some other file in mind?

While you're looking at the config file, make doubly sure that there isn't 
a typo in the restrict_post setting (and, for that matter, that 
restrict_post is the right name of the setting!).  Many of my config file 
mishaps have been typos.

Check that the spam didn't have a from: address from someone in your 
list.  Particularly with the Klez virus going around, this is a 
possibility, and some spammers will use this trick too.  (Klez, for those 
of you fortunate enough not to be familiar with it, takes a random address 
from your Outlook address book and uses that as the From: address for the 
viral mail.  So innocent people then have their names attached to the viral 
messages, although the innocent people do not have infected 
computers.)  Majordomo doesn't do detailed investigative work, so if the 
From: address looked okay, it would have gone through.

And finally, to test without spamming your list... set up a test 
list!  It's fairly unlikely that any of that type of problem would be 
list-specific in majordomo, so set up a test list, subscribe yourself, then 
send email from another account (or get a friend to send email) and see if 
it makes it through.  Test lists are really handy to have for all sorts of 
reasons.

  Terri




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