Administrivia 'who' matches too much

Bug #739524 reported by Joseph Brennan
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
GNU Mailman
Fix Released
Low
Mark Sapiro

Bug Description

Mailman/Utils.py has: 'who': (0, 2),
This matches subject and start-of-line with many ordinary-language sentences or headings like 'who are you?' or 'Who is affected:'. I suggest dialing it back to (0, 1) which would have far fewer false positives, or even (0, 0) as it once was.

Revision history for this message
Mark Sapiro (msapiro) wrote :

I think the consequences of allowing mail with the command "who <password>" containing the list admin password to go to the list if inadvertently sent to the list posting address are more serious than the consequences of a false positive administrivia hold.

The "who <password> address=<address>" form is probably less used and less likely to contain the list password, since the address= option is irrelevant if the password is the list admin or moderator password. Since the argument count range was (0, 0) prior to Mailman 2.1.10, I think changing it to (0, 1) is OK, but I think (0, 0) has too much risk.

Also, note that any message that contains more than DEFAULT_MAIL_COMMANDS_MAX_LINES non-blank body lines prior to any '-- ' signature separator is not administrivia, so reducing DEFAULT_MAIL_COMMANDS_MAX_LINES from the default 25 can also reduce the false positives.

Changed in mailman:
assignee: nobody → Mark Sapiro (msapiro)
importance: Undecided → Low
milestone: none → 2.1.15
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Joseph Brennan (brennan-columbia) wrote :

As a new-ish Mailman admin I couldn't say how common the 1 and 2 args would be -- need you to judge. And I missed DEFAULT_MAIL_COMMANDS_MAX_LINES-- thank you.

Revision history for this message
Mark Sapiro (msapiro) wrote :

Committed change from (0, 2) to (0, 1).

Changed in mailman:
status: Triaged → Fix Committed
Mark Sapiro (msapiro)
Changed in mailman:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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