Making all bounces, even temporary ones, go to list owner ASAP
Many of my customers run tightly-controlled lists where it's important to know (immediately, if possible) if email to any of the members is bouncing (eg, an ISP mailing its customer base), even if the bounce is temporary.
Is there a way to do this using the bounce processing options in Mailman? EG, set the warn threshold really low and have all warnings be cc'd to the list owner?
An obvious hack is to tweak the alias generator to do things like:
listname-bounces: listname-owner
but is there a cleaner (and "officially supported") way?
I realize the list owners will also get "vacation" replies, but that's OK (in this situation, it's worth the hassle of getting these to know when email is really bouncing)
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Kelly Jones wrote:
Many of my customers run tightly-controlled lists where it's important to know (immediately, if possible) if email to any of the members is bouncing (eg, an ISP mailing its customer base), even if the bounce is temporary.
Is there a way to do this using the bounce processing options in Mailman? EG, set the warn threshold really low and have all warnings be cc'd to the list owner?
There are a couple of settings. You need to set both bounce_unrecognized_goes_to_list_owner and bounce_notify_owner_on_disable to Yes. The former sends all messages received at the -bounces address which aren't recognized and handled by bounce processing to the list owner. This includes the vacation autoresponders.
This leaves messages which are recognized as bounces. Of these, bounces for addresses that aren't list members (possibly a DSN reporting a final delivery address different from the original) will be discarded as will 'delayed' notices. The rest will be scored. If you set bounce_score_threshold to 1.0 or less, the member's delivery will be disabled on the first bounce and the owner notified along with a copy of the bounce per bounce_notify_owner_on_disable. Now, the owner will probably want to re-enable delivery for that member if the owner thinks the bounce is 'temporary'.
Don't be concerned about 'soft bounces' only scoring 0.5. That's wrong in the documentation. All bounces scored at all are scored 1.0.
Other caveats. If there are any members with bounce scores currently >= 1.0, even if the info is stale, they will be disabled the next time cron/disabled runs.
If VERP_PROBES is set to Yes in mm_cfg.py, I think it is possible for the message to bounce for a 'temporary' reason, and the subsequent probe to not bounce. In this case, the member won't be disabled and the owner won't be notified of the original message bounce.
An obvious hack is to tweak the alias generator to do things like:
listname-bounces: listname-owner
but is there a cleaner (and "officially supported") way?
The only problem with the above is you lose the benefits of automated bounce processing. If you can arrange for your MTA to both pipe the -bounces mail to the wrapper for bounce processing and deliver it to -owner, you can have both.
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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Kelly Jones -
Mark Sapiro