On Sunday, August 3, 2003, at 12:53 am, Tom Stoner wrote:

Hello,

I am a list administrator on a Mailman 2.0.7 system, and not a system administrator. I've already referred this problem to our system administrators and they've attributed it to a worm or virus infection by one or more list members. I don't think so, and believe they just don't have any ideas about what's causing the problem and are blowing me off and hoping the problem will go away on its own. Here's what's happening:

For the past three or four months, about half a dozen non-deliverable monthly subscription reminder messages come bouncing back to me.
They're addressed to "<mylist>-admin@<domain>.org. None of these people are members of my list however. They are however reportedly members of one or more other lists on this same system. A fact which may or may not be important is that when the available lists on the system are shown alphabetically, my list is first one.

One possible cause of receiving bounce notices for mail address that are apparently not members is rewriting of mail aliases by some system out there, where the rewritten email address is undeliverable.

Typical problem is person A leaves the business and their mail alias is redirected to person B or Person A's mail is setup up so that their secretary gets a copy of their mail as Person B. Person B subsequently leaves the business and their mail alias is removed but redirection of mail to person A's alias is continued. Result is mail sent to the alias of person A is bounced because it is undeliverable to the alias of person B, in respect of whose alias the bounce notice is raised.

These situations can be a real pain to track down but may not be the cause of your grief. But, at least I know this problem occurs while the hypothesized worm or virus causes I have not seen.

One approach I have used, with MM 2.1.2, to track down elusive bounces is to temporarily enable personalization and VERP for a list with bounce problems, set a maximum bounce score < 1.0, ensure list is set to notify list owner when bounces cause unsubscribe, send a test message to the list, and see what the VERP'ed return addresses are on the bouce notifications of the users unsubscribed because of bounces.

I do not know of a simple answer to tracking this sort of problem down with MM 2.0.7

Just a few minutes ago I visited the archives for your users list here for the first time ever and scanned the archives for the past couple months. I didn't spot anything previously posted which I thought related to this problem however. As I said, I'm not a Mailman system administrator.
So I'm not familiar with configuration settings other than those I can change for my own list. I don't know how those monthly reminder messages are configured or sent, nor do I presume to have the necessary access rights to get in and even just look at them. That said, are there any suggestions I might pass back to the system administrators about this? In advance, thank you very much.

Tom Stoner Ann Arbor tgstoner@umich.edu