add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?

[Grant Taylor]

On 3/22/23 12:38 PM, Julien ÉLIE wrote:
> Hi Grant,

Hi Julien,

> Is this something we can do at the level of INN?

I don't know.  Maybe.  I'm looking at a handy sendmail manual page.

> I am under the impression it is a configuration of the MTA, and we 
> cannot do much within INN.

I'm wondering about including a small utility that will take messages 
from STDIN like the sendmail command does and actually does the (E)SMTP 
to the mail server.  That would allow leveraging all the ESMTP features 
that I'm thinking of presuming the SMTP server supports ESMTP.

> Should we just add a sentence in the description of the mta parameter in 
> the inn.conf manual page?

Eh....  I sort of feel like that might be taking th easy way out.  If 
that's what's decided, then so be it.

> Something like "If you want to monitor the deliverability of mails sent 
> by INN programs (notably to moderators, gateways or TOP1000 project), 
> you should tweak the configuration of your local MTA, for instance by 
> enabling bounce in the notify_classes parameter of Postfix."

It would probably be good to include something akin to "INN benefits 
from an MTA that is configured to support <BLA>" type thing.

> Beware that if we say something in the documentation, we will surely 
> receive questions about it (how to configure it, etc.).

Yep.  I'm okay with citing RFC options and (re)directing people to their 
Postmaster for help.  Anything above and beyond that is gravy to me.

> I'm not expert on mails, so maybe that's not the right thing to do.  As 
> the envelope sender is not set (-f not used in the sendmail command), 
> bounces may not work?

There's a balance of how much should be passed to the command line vs 
how much should be the newsmaster / postmaster responsibility to 
configure on the / their MTA.

> Should we also recommend to add "-f <newsmasteraddress>" at the end of 
> the mta line (whose defaults to "/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -oem %s") to 
> better monitor the deliverability of mails?

Maybe.  Though that's going to require an additional configuration 
related to the news server being a trusted user.

> Any other thing?

I think the following additional options are interesting:

  - `-N failure` means to only return a DSN on failure, not delay.
  - `-F "TNet Newsmaster" means to set the human name of the 
notification to "TNet Newsmaster".
  - `-opnobodyreturn` means to only return headers in the DSN.

I just tested with the following command:

    uname -a | sendmail -opnobodyreturn -oi -oem -N failure -F "TNet 
Consulting Newsmaster" gtaylor

N.B. gtaylor is being delivered locally directly to my mailbox on my 
email server.  Replace as necessary.

> Which domains should have their DNS updated?  It seems that 
> moderators.isc.org should list all the configuration, and also possible 
> other sites mentioned in the moderators file (fido7.org, 
> nl.news-admin.org, etc.).  It's still somewhat centralized.

I was sort of thinking along the lines of building the an incomplete 
hierarchy in DNS of the newsgroups that wanted to be moderated with this 
method.  E.g.

test.alt.newmodinfo.isc.org

That would allow delegating sub-domains to other moderators to manage 
the values for the newsgroups.

Maybe that's asking too much infrastructure for something that's not 
used much.  Especially for something that can be overcome.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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