[Mailman-Users] excessive bounces bug

Mark Sapiro msapiro at value.net
Sat Feb 18 19:28:17 CET 2006

Travis Derouin wrote:
>I am the list owner, but there have been at least 2 non-list owner
>addresses that have also received this same message, when their
>addresses shouldn't have been disabled.  Bounce processing was
>enabled,  bounce_notify_owner_on_disable is yes.

So did you receive the owner notification of the "bounce action" in
addition to the message you received as a user that your membership
was disabled? You should have, and it would contain a copy of the
actual bounce that Mailman received, and that would perhaps shed some
light on what's happening.

>Possibly, but it doesn't make any sense why our e-mail addresses are
>bouncing when we are really receiving the e-mail that is sent out, so
>I don't have much confidence that this will fix things.

Even if you are receiving every message, it is possible that there is
some misconfigured MTA somewhere that is returning a bounce for mail
that is actually delivered, or possibly some MTA is returning a
"delay" or some other non-bounce that is being misinterpreted as a
bounce. That's why you wan't to see the "bounce action" notification
to see what the bounce actually says.

>Ok, apparently 1457 members out of 6327 are disabled, this number
>seems quite high. 585 of them are gmail addresses, 602 of them are aol
>addresses, which accounts for most of the disabled addresses. The rest
>of them vary. Does that shed light on what might be happening?

Possibly. AOL for sure and possibly gmail return all sorts of funny
notices, but (as I keep repeating) you have to see the owner
notification and see the actual bounce. You should have received 1457
of these notices at one time or another, one for each disabled by
bounce user at the time of the disable.

>By disabling bounce processing, will this  ignore the previous
>disabling of addresses, since the recipients haven't received the
>remaining 3 reminders (sounds like a tongue twister)?

No. Once a member is disabled by bounce, the proces is taken over by
the cron/disabled job which sends the periodic reminders and does the
ultimate removal. You will need to re-enable delivery for these
members if you want them to receive further posts and not be
automatically removed.


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