On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 07:30:51PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
There are a couple of interesting things in MM3 that makes it different from MM2. In MM3, users and addresses are global to the system, while membership is specific to a mailing list. This means if we register a bounce on an address, we can have that score affect the address's subscription to all relevant mailing list.
This makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, particularly for large (multi-site, multi-client) installations -- Hosting Co, &c.
We can also do things like automatically roll over to another registered and validated email address for that user, if there is one, or at least send notifications to the other address.
Hum. If the auto-rollover knew "oh, it's a different MX" there might be a point. However, just trying adam@amyl.org.uk, instead of adam-mailman@amyl.org.uk, or adam+tarpit@amyl.org.uk, would not be very useful, I'd imagine. Maybe an option to specify "this is my recovery address, send bounce-notifications here, please" might be useful? (for end users). It would obviously need to spell out, quite clearly for which address it releated to, as finding an envelope-to: header seems to be tricky for users.
There's also the question about how all the bounce scores are managed, and the knobs you as a list administrator can tweak to control how and when things happen based on the score. Reporting and logging are also part of the plan.
I'm perhaps a little cavalier in my approach; I generally let Mailman handle the bounces, so I can do something useful. About the most I delve, when I don't need to investigate "why aren't I getting mail" is a monthly report of numbers of subscribers, changes to that figure from previous month, and "reasons" why people left, pulled from subscribe.log, at the moment.
Because MM3 uses a relational database underneath the hood, my plan is to have a single table that only appends new bounce events. That way, Mailman will have a permanent record of every bounce that occurred.
What may be useful is to supplement this with a pertinent dates table, too, something like start-date/end-date/few-words-on-problem, either controlled by Chief Goncho (aka site-admins), or maybe with something for listadmins; the case I'm thinking of may be to show that, say the LINX have had problems for a couple of months, "MTA tweak for redelivery attempts to yahoo.com made on 2010-02-04"; these would be added to a gnuplot/graph in a separate color, in my vision (maybe I've used google analytics too long, but clicking on the event for more info would be grand). Perhaps that's function creep, though.
Exactly what information we can or should put in that table is up for discussion. I do plan also to keep all bounce messages in MM3's "message store" so that postmortem debugging is easier.
In which case, there should definately be an option for "keep bounce messages in store for N months", and perhaps make list-specific ones available to list-admins.
Because I'm just starting to think about all this, I wanted to throw this out to the list to get your feedback on things you'd like to see. What is it about MM2's bounce processing that you like?
It does most of the work for me; I set the global parameters, and generally, just leave Mailman to do everything for me. I might sometimes see the "been removed from the list due to bounce" mails; if those were on a grid-thing somewhere in the admin pages, I don't think I'd need/want the mails.
What don't you like? What MM2 bounce features can you do without? What would you like to see added?
Any and all feedback is welcome. -Barry
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