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The release notes and NEWS file for Mailman 2.1.11 contains the
following innocuous looking item.
~ - Improved bounce loop detection and handling in BounceRunner.py.
This actually first appeared in 2.1.11rc2. It turns out this had an
unintended consequence, but I actually think it is a good thing.
The change involved bounces returned to the site list (mailman list)
- -bounces address. There was always code in BounceRunner.py to look at
bounces returned to the site list -bounces address to try to detect if
the bounce was a bounce of a notice to a list owner, and if so, to send
the bounce to the site list instead of processing it. This code never
worked right.
The main problem, is I don't in general know how to tell to what address
the bounced message was originally sent. If I did, there would never be
an unrecognized bounce. So part of the change in 2.1.11 rc2 and final is
to just forward to the site list owner any message that arrives to the
site list -bounces address so the owner can handle the bounce.
The unintended consequence is that bounces of password reminders will
also now go to the site list owner whereas before they were probably
just ignored or processed as unrecognized bounces to the site list.
Most of these bounces will probably be for dead addresses where the user
disabled delivery and forgot about the list and the address died and the
password reminders have been bouncing for a long time.
In the longer term, plain text passwords and reminders are going away,
but in the short term, the site list owner may get a lot of bounced
password reminders (possibly a whole lot in a large site) on the first
of the month following installation of this release.
I think the best way to deal with these is to remove the dead addresses
from the lists. Once this is done, the number of bounces on an ongoing
basis should be small.
- --
Mark Sapiro