The problem I described in January is still happening. I find the current bounce processing of mailman to be inadequate. Something more like the bounce processing of ezmlm is needed.
I should not be removed from a mailing list purely on the basis of bounces of uncontrolled messages. The messages that bounced could have been spam or outlook worms or whatever.
Before removing a subscriber mailman should send a message with known content testing the address. Only if such a message bounces should a user be dropped.
As it is I'm being removed from mailing lists whenever a new Outlook worm appears and sends multiple messages in a row. Or a new spammer discovers a list I'm on and sends multiple messages in a row to the list.
It's especially bad on low-volume lists where it's quite possible for spam or Outlook worm messages to be the only messages for days.
Greg Stark <gsstark@MIT.EDU> writes:
I find I am being removed from mailman mailing lists left and right. I believe the default values for the bounce removal should be reconsidered. It's possible that you haven't had many users in my situation and so haven't really had a chance to tune these parameters on the low end yet. But they clearly aren't working for me at a few sites.
My particular situation is that my site has seen fit to filter viruses by refusing delivery. This causes a bounce from the remote MTA every time someone sends me an Outlook virus. Why my site administrators felt this was necessary is a question for another day, it's not like I use Outlook or like my spam filters wouldn't have thrown these messages away anyways, but whatever.
The net result is that some small fraction of messages to me bounce and list management software notices this. The only reason I became aware of the problem was because ezmlm also does this type of processing but it sends a warning message before removing users. It only removes you if the warning message itself bounces. In fact it sends two such warning messages and only removes the user if *both* bounce. This provides the user with a chance to react to the first message and fix the problem -- if they ever see the message.
I could beg for a similar feature in mailman, but I'm not sure it's necessary. But I am sure it's necessary to tune the bounce processing parameters. The relatively few bounces I'm generating shouldn't be causing me to get removed when all the real messages are being delivered fine.
It seems the legitimate messages that are correctly delivered should reset the count of bounces to 0. Reading the source it seems it has to see DEFAULT_MAX_POSTS_BETWEEN_BOUNCES such legitimate posts between messages. I'm fairly convinced this parameter should always be 0. If any successful delivery occurs the user should never be removed due to bounces.
What I don't understand is how DEFAULT_MAX_POSTS_BETWEEN_BOUNCES relates to the parameters I see in the admin. None of the parameters in the admin corresponds to this. How is it calculated?
-- greg
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-- greg