E-Mail from EN World Bounces

[Tristol]

I run a domain in which several people there subscribe to the forums here. As such, they get e-mails whenever new threads are posted. I happened to be poking at the logs, and noticed that there are a large number of rejected e-mails that are coming from the website. I'll post the snippet of sendmail and milter logs that matters and explain briefly what it means. If someone needs help resolving the issue, I'd be glad to provide some input.

Sep 24 10:34:46 vixen sm-mta[29987]: STARTTLS=server, relay=IDENT:0@www.enworld.org [65.127.163.19], version=TLSv1/SSLv3, verify=NO, cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, bits=256/256
Sep 24 10:34:47 vixen sm-mta[29987]: l8OEYknQ029987: from=<nobody@enworld.cyberstreet.com>, size=1984, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<200709241430.bac67d935504@www.enworld.org>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=IDENT:0@www.enworld.org [65.127.163.19]
Sep 24 10:34:47 vixen sid-filter[29990]: l8OEYknQ029987 can't determine responsible domain from `"Eeee Ennn World - Morrus' D&D / 4th Edition / d20 News" <>'
Sep 24 10:34:47 vixen sm-mta[29987]: l8OEYknQ029987: Milter: data, reject=550 5.7.1 can't identify domain in `"Eeee Ennn World - Morrus' D&D / 4th Edition / d20 News" <>'

In short, notice that it greats the mailserver and provides the envelope sender of nobody@enworld.cyberstreet.com. Not a problem there, but then notice that the sid-filter is examining the 'From' address posted into the e-mail headers. This from address is what's included on the last two lines. Properly formatted 'from' addresses should include the name, followed by a < the e-mail address, and a closing >. There are different formats, but it appears that the e-mail being sent only includes a name, no from address.

I'm not exactly sure if it's always been this way, but it's technically a misconfiguration as anyone running spam filterting software may reject e-mails because of the invalid format. The next e-mail I get from the forums at my yahoo address I'll post the pertinent headers of so that more information is available to whoever may want to fix this (if someone wants to fix it).

 

[Elephant]

I second this request. Email filters can be made more easily if the headers are properly configured. Besides, it's better for the site if its emails don't share common characteristics with spam.

 

[Tristol]

Since someone was gracious enough to reply to this thread, I managed to get a copy of the headers that were sent to my yahoo account. I've sanitized the appropriate portions to keep things from getting nasty on my end, but this may also help in fixing the problem.

Return-Path: <nobody@enworld.cyberstreet.com>
Authentication-Results: mta207.mail.re2.yahoo.com from=; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 65.127.163.19 (EHLO enworld.cyberstreet.com) (65.127.163.19)
by mta207.mail.re2.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:00:40 -0700
Received: from enworld.cyberstreet.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by enworld.cyberstreet.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id l8P2tEP1017699
for <*******@yahoo.com>; Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:55:14 -0400
Received: (from nobody@localhost)
by enworld.cyberstreet.com (8.12.11/8.12.11/Submit) id l8P2tEQS017696;
Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:55:14 -0400
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:55:14 -0400
To: *******@yahoo.com
Subject: Reply to post 'Bug - E-Mail from EN World Bounces'
From: "Eeee Ennn World - Morrus' D&D / 4th Edition / d20 News" <>
Message-ID: <200709250214.2c5ce1627511@www.enworld.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Length: 1064

I've underlined the appropriate line above. Envelope sender and return-path seem to be valid and correct according to RFC spec. The from field is missing a valid address inside the angled brackets. Most purists will say that it needs to be a real e-mail address, but in this case, I'd argue that it just needs to be an e-mail address, even if it's the same nobody address as in the envelope sender. That would at least give the spam filters less to complain about, and make it much less likely some typical 'out of the box' configurations won't deny e-mail sourced from the forums.