[Mailman-Users] A Known bug with confirmation string & excessive bounces
I have sent this in before but I guess the powers that be are NOT interested. There is definitely something wrong with the bounce process with regards to the Confirmation string.
The first time I reported this the problem occurred on the Mailman-users list. The other times it is occurring on a list that I host. This is not a random problem.
On 14 January 2003, I received the following message: "Your membership in the mailing list Mailman-Users has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 14-Jan-2003."
On 13 February 2003, I received the following message: "Your membership in the mailing list Mailman-Users has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 14-Jan-2003."
The confirmation sting that was sent on both times follows. 37037b7a051f71a816e27e8e0b9ba82aaf107f7b
The confirmation string has been invalid each time! Further on one of my lists a member received a confirmation string but his account was okay. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?
Thomas
Tspeight@rockygorge.com wrote in message news:5.1.0.14.2.20030217105852.03325008@mail.rockygorge.com...
There is definitely something wrong with the bounce process with regards to the Confirmation string.
Yeah, I think I've seen something like that ... but I have no hard evidence to back it up.
david
At 02:03 PM 2/17/2003, Tspeight@rockygorge.com wrote:
I have sent this in before but I guess the powers that be are NOT interested. There is definitely something wrong with the bounce process with regards to the Confirmation string.
The first time I reported this the problem occurred on the Mailman-users list. The other times it is occurring on a list that I host. This is not a random problem.
On 14 January 2003, I received the following message: "Your membership in the mailing list Mailman-Users has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 14-Jan-2003."
On 13 February 2003, I received the following message: "Your membership in the mailing list Mailman-Users has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 14-Jan-2003."
The confirmation sting that was sent on both times follows. 37037b7a051f71a816e27e8e0b9ba82aaf107f7b
The confirmation string has been invalid each time! Further on one of my lists a member received a confirmation string but his account was okay. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?
No, I've not seen it on any of the lists I manage -- about 120 of them -- and I've not had any problem with mailman-users list. I'm running Mailman 2.1.1 on all of our list servers.
Larry
Thomas
Altho I haven't seen the problem on any of the lists I run on my own server, I have experienced this exact problem on both mailman-users and mailman-developers lists here.
What gets me about this is that altho it says I'm generating excessive bounces, I get the bounce notification just fine. But when I hit the URL, it gives me an invalid confirmation string. Also, I appear to be receiving email from both lists just fine until I get these notices.
I might suggest that a change be made to the code that when these excessive bounce notices are sent, that the most recent bounce message be included with the notice. There is no reason for my mail to bounce. I've NEVER had mail bounce before. I suspect that the bouncing mail is probably really an address above or below mine in the database and that the excessive bounce process is off by one in the subscriber list when it decides to cut someone off, and as a result I get cut off instead of the address next to me which is the one that's really bouncing. Having the most recent bounce included in the notification would allow me, as a user, to take steps to prevent the bounces in the future, and prove whether it really was me or not that was bouncing. Otherwise this is a fairly unfriendly action being taken by mailman, imho.
Tspeight@rockygorge.com wrote in message news:5.1.0.14.2.20030217105852.03325008@mail.rockygorge.com...
I have sent this in before but I guess the powers that be are NOT interested. There is definitely something wrong with the bounce process with regards to the Confirmation string.
Now I can confirm this ... I've now had a number of complaints about the confirmation string's being considered invalid.
david
Tspeight@rockygorge.com wrote in message news:5.1.0.14.2.20030217105852.03325008@mail.rockygorge.com...
I have sent this in before but I guess the powers that be are NOT interested. There is definitely something wrong with the bounce process with regards to the Confirmation string.
Can anyone explain how confirmation strings are generated and how they are correlated to the users request?
I have a theory, but need some information.
david
"David Gibbs" david@midrange.com wrote in message news:b2tjrj$r7a$1@main.gmane.org...
Tspeight@rockygorge.com wrote in message news:5.1.0.14.2.20030217105852.03325008@mail.rockygorge.com... Can anyone explain how confirmation strings are generated and how they are correlated to the users request?
Anyone know of a way to force a subscription to be disabled such that it requires a confirmation to be sent out?
david
On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 14:03, Tspeight@rockygorge.com wrote:
I have sent this in before but I guess the powers that be are NOT interested. There is definitely something wrong with the bounce process with regards to the Confirmation string.
Apologies for the delay in responding.
The first time I reported this the problem occurred on the Mailman-users list. The other times it is occurring on a list that I host. This is not a random problem.
On 14 January 2003, I received the following message: "Your membership in the mailing list Mailman-Users has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 14-Jan-2003."
On 13 February 2003, I received the following message: "Your membership in the mailing list Mailman-Users has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 14-Jan-2003."
The confirmation sting that was sent on both times follows. 37037b7a051f71a816e27e8e0b9ba82aaf107f7b
The confirmation string has been invalid each time! Further on one of my lists a member received a confirmation string but his account was okay. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?
Here are my suspicions. I'm Cc'ing Thomas Wouters because he was recently fixing some bugs in what I believe is the offending code.
First a question: for those of you seeing this problem, are your lists on fairly active Mailman systems? For purposes of this discussion, I'd classify python.org as active enough.
The confirmation strings are kept in a database file shared by all lists on your site, called data/pending.pck. Normally, access to this file is serialized via a lock file, but in we have our suspicions that there is a race condition or other bug in the LockFile.py implementation that may allow concurrent writes to this file. We haven't been able to debug the problem, nor is it easily reproducible, but if it's true, then my suspicion is that you're getting bitten by the same bug. I don't know for sure, but I can say that in simple, one-by-one testing on my laptop, I can't provoke an invalid confirmation string.
Now Thomas implemented some fixes to pending.pck which should avoid the race condition, if one exists. This is in cvs and will be part of 2.1.2. python.org should be running this codebase so if you see the problem on mailman-users or mailman-developers from here on out, I want to know about it.
The real fix is for each list to get their own pending database, but I don't think that'll get implemented in the 2.1-maint branch unless Thomas's fix isn't enough.
-Barry
participants (5)
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Barry Warsaw -
David Gibbs -
Larry Hansford -
Tspeight＠rockygorge.com -
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