[Mailman-Users] Suppressing "You have been unsubscribed" after bounce removal

[Larry Stone]

I use mailman (2.1.8) for a number of broadcast lists to organization
members. The members don't know anything about mailman - I do all the
suscrbing and unsubscribing manually with no notification to the member
(thank goodness for mass subscribe and unsubscribe). Since the user knows
nothing about mailman, when they reach the bounce threshold, they're
immediately removed with no "Your membership is disabled" warnings.

I was surprised to see recently that "You have been unsubscribed" messages
are still sent to the user when a "by bounce" unsubscribe occurs despite
"Send goodbye message to members when they are unsubscribed?" being set to
No in General Options. I recall that Mailman didn't previously do so but I
might be mis-remembering. Is there a way to suppress the "You have been
unsubscribed" message?

Obviously, if the bounce is for "no user", then the second message will
bounce too but for those ISPs who count how many hits there are on
non-existent users from the same address, this is not good. And for quota
bounces, it's possible that the "You have been unsubscribed" will get
through when the original didn't.

I only noticed this recently when I did a mailing using a list of about
1,400 addresses from the state association of which 300 turned out to be
bad, mostly for no such user. Besides everything else, that's extra load
on the MTA that doesn't need to be there.

-- Larry Stone
   lstone19 at stonejongleux.com