Mailman 3 July 2025 - Mailman-Users

Unbouncing People
by David Andrews July 21, 2025

July 21, 2025

We are currently being blocked by Microsoft -- working to reverse. Consequently, people with Microsoft-related domains, live.com, msn.com, hotmail.com and outlook.com, aren't getting their mail. Microsoft also processes mail for others, so quite a problem. People are put on hold after there is non-delivery for a period of time. I go in to lists and take off the B hold, because I don't want them unsubscribed for something that isn't their fault. This takes some time and is tedious. Is there a command, or set of commands that will go through a list, or all lists, and remove the bounces? thanks! Dave

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Subscription Attacks
by David Andrews July 15, 2025

July 15, 2025

My system is undergoing a subscription attack. This made the mail queue grow alarmingly, and because the software is trying to respond to bad addresses, it has caused Microsoft to block us completely and they refuse to remove the block right now. We are taking steps to improve situation, have adjusted Exim so it doesn't retry mails so often, MS objected to volume and irregularity of mail from us. We are also looking at setting hourly rates, although not sure where to set them Captchas aren't a good solution as we have many thousands of blind, and deaf-blind users. There is stuff about the "secret form?" would this work? If I understand it, the IP must match. Then there is stuff about the life of the form? Do both conditions have to be true.? Many of our users do not return a form quickly, they are not that good with their assistive technology! The writing suggests five seconds, that would never work for us. Are there other things we can do to get us out of this mess? Thanks in advance! Dave

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Deleting Subscriptions
by David Andrews July 12, 2025

July 12, 2025

I have a couple lists that are under some kind of subscription attack. There are thousands of subscription requests being held. I have things set to delete held messages after one day, but it doesn't seem to apply to subscription requests. Is there a way I can delete all at once, I can't find anything in UI. Is there a sub-directory I can empty? Dave

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Somewhat off-topic: Postmaster and other administrative addresses, are they necessary?
by Jayson Smith July 11, 2025

July 11, 2025

Hi, Recently I've been getting lots of very similar spam. The sending address seems to always be info(a)some.domain, the sender's name is one of an apparently fixed set of firstname lastname, the subjects are always something very generic like "Read this," "Hello," "Hi," etc., the body of the message consists of English words in a seemingly random word salad such that no meaning can be derived from the message, and I'm betting there's a picture or something that's supposed to hide the dummy body text in order to show the real spam message. Anyway, these Emails seem to be coming mostly to root, webmaster, and postmaster addresses at my domains, which I've been forwarding to my primary Email account. My question is, are there any negative consequences I might face for disabling delivery to these addresses by returning 5xx delivery failure messages during the SMTP stage? I know there are a few RFC's which specify that postmaster@ must be a valid address at all domains. Are there any Email or other systems that actually care about this, and will declare me to be an evil, non-compliant server administrator if such addresses do not accept mail? Thanks, Jayson

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Create moderator-only accessible list of allowed posters?
by Brie Yoder July 7, 2025

July 7, 2025

[Running Mailman 2.1.39 on Dreamhost] I am attempting to create a 2-tiered list of subscribers to a Mailman list, where everyone would receive all posts (modulo those whose subscription is paused, etc.), and a 2nd tier (subset of everyone) who would be allowed to post. This would be different than setting the ‘mod’ bit for each user - it would be something only a list admin/moderator could change, and would allow an immediate rejection of posts, with an optional rejection message for non-2nd tier subscribers. I searched the archives and looked through the docs, but couldn't find anything which would allow this. Does this functionality exist in Mailman 3? Thanks for any pointers! Thanks, Brie

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