As you can see in below e-mail, I did not send a virus, but a virus filled out my details in the from address. This causes a steady flow of one 'undelivered' type e-mail message per minute into my mail box.

That other mail server administrators don't know jack about their job is their problem, but I do expect the GIMPs mailing list server to be set up correctly. Could whoever is running that server set it up so that it won't look at the From field (or the Reply-to field, or the envelope, which can all be faked) to determine the sender?

On 21 Aug 2003, at 2:03, Mail Delivery System wrote:

This is a MIME-encapsulated message.

--B6C03B0CA.1061456625/scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU Content-Description: Notification
Content-Type: text/plain

This is the Postfix program at host scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.

For further assistance, please send mail to

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the message returned below.

The Postfix program

: mail for scam.xcf.berkeley.edu loops
back to myself

--B6C03B0CA.1061456625/scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU Content-Description: Delivery error report Content-Type: message/delivery-status

Reporting-MTA: dns; scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU Arrival-Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 02:03:45 -0700 (PDT)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; gimp-developer@scam.xcf.berkeley.edu Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; mail for scam.xcf.berkeley.edu loops back to myself

--B6C03B0CA.1061456625/scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU Content-Description: Undelivered Message Content-Type: message/rfc822

Received: from lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU (lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.112.242])
by scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU (Postfix) with ESMTP id B6C03B0CA for ; Thu, 21 Aug 2003 02:03:45
-0700 (PDT) Received: from DELL (dhcp024-166-103-189.neo.rr.com [24.166.103.189])
by lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU (Postfix) with ESMTP id 83FDEFE0B for ; Thu, 21 Aug 2003 02:11:51
-0700 (PDT) From:

On 23 Aug 2003, at 14:52, pcg@goof.com wrote:

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 11:28:53AM +0200, Branko Collin wrote: > That other mail server administrators don't know jack about their job

Unfortunately, that kind of setup (looking at the envelope to bounce errors) is correct, and useful.

that it won't look at the From field (or the Reply-to field, or the envelope, which can all be faked) to determine the sender?

While that might be possible, it is the same as switching off all error messages, which is not very useful.

If no other solution is possible (filtering on that specific kind of bounce, like we can do on bugs@gimp.org), chances are low to get this working.

The mail server could look at the domain of the server where it got the mail from. If those are not similar, the mail server could decide to let the originating server deal with the problem, by sending a bounce with a comment. There are of course many valid situations in which the domain of the originating mail server is not the same as the domain in the From or Reply-to fields or in the envelope, but in the case of a virus or of spam it is not too much of a stretch to assume malicious intent as the default.