1150740 - Please create anonymized mailman list at [e-mail]

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations :: Infrastructure: Mail, task)

Description

[Camille Francois]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.104 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Would you help me set up an anonymised private mailman list at [e-mail]? 

We will need it for a cyber security study (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Netpolicy/Cybersecurity_Delphi) in order for participants to talk to each other without knowing who is behind each statement and who is in the list.

I understand that masking participant email addresses is an option in the mailman setup—can you confirm? The messages sent to [e-mail] could then either appear as coming from a pseudonym or number assigned to real email address or could appear as being sent from the list itself?

Comment 1

[Ed Lim [:limed]]

Its possible, sort of? The options that you are looking for is 

anonymous_list = True

But there are 2 other options that you might want to take a look at as well is:

first_strip_reply_to = yes
reply_goes_to_list = poster

This might not give you 100% of what you want though (more info here[1]). I myself haven't played around with this option so I am not 100% on how this would work, so if you want we can go ahead and create the list for you but you might want to test and play around with the settings to see if this gives you the result that you want/need

[1]: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2010-October/070484.html

Comment 2

[Chris Riley [:mchris, :criley]]

Let's create the list and see how it works, then tweak if needed. I think we want anonymous_list = True; we also want first_strip_reply_to = yes; and I think we can leave reply_goes_to_list blank, but we might need to change that to set it = poster later.

Basically, we don't want to enable any option to write back just to the individual sender; we want the *only* reply option to be a reply-all to the list, anonymized so that nobody knows who wrote any of the content. (I know this is an unusual circumstance, but this is a time-limited list only, alive for 2 weeks then ended.)

Comment 3

[Ed Lim [:limed]]

List has been created and made [e-mail] the admin

Comment 4

[Ed Lim [:limed]]

Let me know how this works out for you guys, reopen if you need anything else.

Comment 5

[Camille Francois]

Hi Ed, thanks a lot!
Last important question on our end: is there a way for admin to see who engaged with the list? 
For the research we won't need to know who is behind each email sent to the list, though it would be very helpful to have an idea of how many people are engaging with the list. 
For instance, as an admin if I read 40 messages on the list, do I have a way to find out if it's coming from 2 people talking back and forth or if it is the product of a conversation between 30 members of the list? 
Thanks again for the help.

Comment 6

[Ed Lim [:limed]]

(In reply to Camille Francois from comment #5)
> Hi Ed, thanks a lot!
> Last important question on our end: is there a way for admin to see who
> engaged with the list? 
> For the research we won't need to know who is behind each email sent to the
> list, though it would be very helpful to have an idea of how many people are
> engaging with the list. 
> For instance, as an admin if I read 40 messages on the list, do I have a way
> to find out if it's coming from 2 people talking back and forth or if it is
> the product of a conversation between 30 members of the list? 
> Thanks again for the help.

I don't believe so, there are mail logs that get logged on the server and mailman does not make that data available.

Comment 7

[Chris Riley [:mchris, :criley]]

Hi Ed et al,

Can we work to strip out SPF headers in the emails? They're seeing e.g. these: ""Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [e-mail] designates 209.85.216.54 as permitted sender) client-ip=209.85.216.54; ""

Here's a tip from a friend on relevant scripts/solutions:

modify /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Cleanse.py to add the following underneath if mlist.anonymous_list:

    del msg['received-spf']
    del msg['authentication-results']
    del msg['domainkey-signature']
    del msg['dkim-signature']

    rm Cleanse.py[oc]
    python -O -c 'import py_compile; py_compile.compile("Cleanse.py")'
    python -c 'import py_compile; py_compile.compile("Cleanse.py")'

http://blog.wtwf.com/2008/03/anonymous-mailman-lists.php/

Comment 8

[Ed Lim [:limed]]

We don't really want to make changes to the source if we can help it. As it stands now we have already made changes to the source code and many times it has caused us more trouble than we would like.

On top of that this change involves every list anonymous list, while this might be an ideal list configuration for you guys it might not be what other people want so I am inclined to not make this change, not to mention that some of these header values involves things that are related to spam prevention, so removal of this might increase spam count

Comment 9

[Chris Riley [:mchris, :criley]]

That makes sense Ed. We'll think about / look into any solutions that wouldn't involve code change, recognizing that there probably aren't any. :-)

Certainly not a show-stopper, but wanted to tee it up for thought / possibilities. Much appreciate the response!

Comment 10

[Ed Lim [:limed]]

(In reply to mchris from comment #9)
> That makes sense Ed. We'll think about / look into any solutions that
> wouldn't involve code change, recognizing that there probably aren't any. :-)
> 
> Certainly not a show-stopper, but wanted to tee it up for thought /
> possibilities. Much appreciate the response!

No problem, let me know what else I can help with