Bounce Processing Emails
Because of excessive spam, I've done what so many of us have had to do, I set the catch-all on my domain name not to go to my inbox. I have a few dozen legit usernames set to come to me. Because some non-spam slips through, I send the leftover usernames to another mailbox I read irregularly (the spam assasin program catches about 3000 spams a day to that mailbox, leaving me with a handful a week to sort through).
Now that my main lists were migrated to Mailman today, I discovered that notifications of bounces are being sent to my catch-all mailbox. For some reason, MM makes up a To: address.
Here's an example: immune-bounces+immune=cunews.carleton.ca@immuneweb.org
The email address of the subscriber whose email bounced is: immune@cunews.carleton.ca
My domain name is immuneweb.org and the name of the list is immune.
Obviously, I can't make email filters for every single one of my subscribers. But I'd like to see the bounce messages.
Is there a way to get MM to simply send the bounces to an address I specify, or just to the list-owner which is specified elsewhere?
Thanks, Cyndi
On 12/11/07, Cyndi Norwitz wrote:
Now that my main lists were migrated to Mailman today, I discovered that notifications of bounces are being sent to my catch-all mailbox. For some reason, MM makes up a To: address.
Here's an example: immune-bounces+immune=cunews.carleton.ca@immuneweb.org
No, Mailman is not making up this address as a "To:" address. This is an address format known as VERP (search the FAQ Wizard), and this is used as the envelope sender address for when you're sending out messages from the mailing list known as "immune" to the recipient address "immune@cunews.carleton.ca". What appears to be happening is that this recipient address is bouncing, thus causing a bounce (a.k.a., "non-delivery notice", or NDN) to be sent back to this VERP sender address.
If your MTA understands the VERP format correctly, it should be passing back everything with an address of "immune-bounces+[insert.whatever.here]@immuneweb.org" back to your Mailman installation, where the standard Mailman bounce handling mechanism should take care of this problem.
Obviously, I can't make email filters for every single one of my subscribers. But I'd like to see the bounce messages.
Generally speaking, you should let Mailman handle the bounces messages automatically.
Is there a way to get MM to simply send the bounces to an address I specify, or just to the list-owner which is specified elsewhere?
That's an option you can take, if you decide to omit all the other standard aliases that need to be created for Mailman. You could just have all that traffic come back to you directly.
However, your bigger problem is that your ISP needs to configure their MTA (postfix, sendmail, whatever) to properly understand VERP format so that you have the possibility of having these bounces sent back to wherever you want. Until the MTA is configured properly, and the aliases are set up properly, there's nothing else you can do.
It all comes down to your ISP understanding how to operate and manage Mailman correctly, as well as understanding how to operate and manage all the related parts of an e-mail system.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
participants (2)
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Brad Knowles -
Cyndi Norwitz