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Google Groups rewriting from addresses to handle DMARC policy [message #187615]

Mon, 05 November 2018 05:11

Zrubi

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Hi,

I just created a PoC project to create a forum interface for some google(groups) based mailing lists.
Now we have been hit by this isuse:
www.spamresource.com/2014/04/google-groups-rewriting-from-addresses.html

As I use the auto user account creation feature, in practice this means that the forged From address causing the forum engine to create a user accoutn using the mailing list email address Smile

The side effects:
- all the affected users mails are appearing under this fake user.
- the password reset function sends out reset links to the public mailing lists.

With this bug - or missing feature to workaround google's bad workaround - makes the forum useless in case of google mailing lists.
I found out that in such cases:
- the mail address in the From filed is always ending with: '@googlegroups.com'
- the real sender address can be found in: 'X-Original-From'

I also started to investigate the responsible code.
It seems trivial to add such exeption, however I don't know if that mail header parsing module is third party code or not...

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Re: Google Groups rewriting from addresses to handle DMARC policy [message #187616 is a reply to message #187615]

Mon, 05 November 2018 14:32

naudefj

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The mail headers are parsed in file "mime_decode.inc", in particular, look at function fetch_useful_headers().
Please post a patch when you're done.

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Re: Google Groups rewriting from addresses to handle DMARC policy [message #187618 is a reply to message #187616]

Wed, 07 November 2018 08:07

Zrubi

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As the issue is NOT google specific, I'm only searched for the existence of the new (X-Original-From) header, and used that instead of the standard - but forged - 'From' header.
It is woks for me - but I only tested it with googlegroups mailing lists.

Attachment: mime_decode.inc-x-original-from.diff
(Size: 2.50KB, Downloaded 163 times)

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Re: Google Groups rewriting from addresses to handle DMARC policy [message #187667 is a reply to message #187618]

Sat, 02 February 2019 07:46

Zrubi

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Another issue, with the same root cause:
When sending mails with fake From address to a mailing list, it will deny or at least delay the message.

The "Fixed from address:" is a workaround, but then we loosing the author of the post.
To workaround this I just created a small modification (attached)

Hence, it is a quick fix, the final solution would be to (optionally?) include additional headers like X-Original-From
And/or probably this sould be template specific?