On Sep 18, 2011, at 10:35 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

...

One of my users sent out a mailing this morning, and 18% of them bounced. All the bounce reports (from remote MTAs) said things about bad addresses. He says this has happened before, but when he made another list, of only the bounces, a lot of them worked.

I can't think of any way this can happen. Have any of you seen something like this?

This seems quite strange. It is almost certainly not a Mailman issue per se unless the bounces complained specifically about the envelope sender of the message (LISTNAME-bounces@LIST.DOMAIN).

Check your Postfix log for the delivery of some of the bounced mail. In particular, look at the receiving MTA for the mail that bounced vs. mail to the same address that didn't bounce. Possibly some DNS glitch caused the first batch to be routed via an incorrect MX.

Thanks for the suggestions. But the vast majority of the bounces talked about 'no user' or 'mailbox full'. And there were a bunch of non-exstant domains (according to whois, not just DNS). I looked through every one this morning, and they all look like completely legit bounces to me. Fortunately, it's a small list.

My user *claims* he's sent successfully to some of these bounced addys, but I haven't seen any. So I'm going to tell him to delete those and pretend like they never existed. Or show me some.

I've never run a mailing list on my server before, and it's not at all trivial, keeping track of all those people. I found SMTP and IP errors this morning that I've heard of, but never seen before.

Thanks again. I think I'm going to decide that Mailman and Postfix are fine; he just needs to keep his list up to date. Unless somebody can suggest something more fun...

-- Glenn English

On Sep 18, 2011, at 10:35 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

...

One of my users sent out a mailing this morning, and 18% of them bounced. All the bounce reports (from remote MTAs) said things about bad addresses. He says this has happened before, but when he made another list, of only the bounces, a lot of them worked.

I can't think of any way this can happen. Have any of you seen something like this?

This seems quite strange. It is almost certainly not a Mailman issue per se unless the bounces complained specifically about the envelope sender of the message (LISTNAME-bounces@LIST.DOMAIN).

Check your Postfix log for the delivery of some of the bounced mail. In particular, look at the receiving MTA for the mail that bounced vs. mail to the same address that didn't bounce. Possibly some DNS glitch caused the first batch to be routed via an incorrect MX.

Thanks for the suggestions. But the vast majority of the bounces talked about 'no user' or 'mailbox full'. And there were a bunch of non-exstant domains (according to whois, not just DNS). I looked through every one this morning, and they all look like completely legit bounces to me. Fortunately, it's a small list.

My user *claims* he's sent successfully to some of these bounced addys, but I haven't seen any. So I'm going to tell him to delete those and pretend like they never existed. Or show me some.

I've never run a mailing list on my server before, and it's not at all trivial, keeping track of all those people. I found SMTP and IP errors this morning that I've heard of, but never seen before.

Thanks again. I think I'm going to decide that Mailman and Postfix are fine; he just needs to keep his list up to date. Unless somebody can suggest something more fun...

-- Glenn English