[Mailman-Developers] bounce processing question and idea for future enhancements...

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JH" == Jeff Hahn <jeffh@streek.com> writes:

    JH> Bounce processing question...

    JH> 	Since some of the big email domains (hotmail, aol,
    JH> etc.) are known to "burp" and deny existence of perfectly
    JH> valid users, I'd like to handle all returns as bounces and not
    JH> remove people automatically on the first "user unknown"
    JH> message. I assume the way to handle it is to change "REMOVE"
    JH> to "BOUNCE" in the lines like the following in bouncer.py

    JH> (regex.compile('.*%s: User unknown.*' % email_regexp),
    JH> REMOVE),

    JH> 	Any comments? Any better way to do it?

We've talked about changing bounce handling so that all bounces of any 
kind are handled similarly.  They'd have a threshold over which the
action would occur.  By default, the address would be disabled, and
then some future attempts would be made to contact the user.  If they
can't be reached after N number of attempts, maybe they'd be removed.
That way if a user is temporarily unavailable (for whatever reason),
they wouldn't get immediately nixed, and they'd have an opportunity
later to re-enable themselves.

-Barry