Launchpad itself

Page needed explaining why greylisting may cause delayed Launchpad mail

Bug #4009 reported by Matthew Paul Thomas
8
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Fix Released
Medium
Matthew Paul Thomas

Bug Description

People are setting up greylisting (non-fatal rejection of the first e-mail message from a given sender) as a way of preventing spam, because spammers don't yet bother retrying rejected addresses. Since Launchpad's mail server may take a while to retry sending, this leads people to think that Launchpad has failed to send them mail to confirm an e-mail address.

Because there is no standard for such rejection messages, Launchpad's mail server cannot special-case them to retry the mail more quickly. So on the Launchpad page for confirming an e-mail address, there needs to be a link to a page explaining the problem with greylisting.

Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
Changed in launchpad:
status: New → Accepted
Revision history for this message
James Henstridge (jamesh) wrote :

It's worth noting that if it was possible for Launchpad to know that it was being greylisted and act accordingly, it would also be possible for spammers to do the same.

So this is almost certainly a documentation-only bug.

Revision history for this message
Trent Lloyd (lathiat) wrote :

I don't think this is even a documentation bug.

If your server is greylisted, you should know it, and that it may cause a delay for delivery, because that is by nature what it does.

Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

If we had access to <email address hidden>, we would be able to check that. I've pestered admins for our RT request..

Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
Changed in launchpad:
assignee: nobody → mpt
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Confirmed → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

For the record the problem is not that the end-user's server is greylisted -- it's that Launchpad's outgoing SMTP server is. If we had access to the bounces output we /could/ know when/if we had tried to contact the end-user's server, though - and why it was bounced.

Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
Changed in launchpad:
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I fixed this for new registrations, but not for adding/changing e-mail addresses. Fixing the latter now.

Changed in launchpad:
status: Fix Committed → In Progress
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
Changed in launchpad:
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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