[Mailman-Developers] effects of not rewriting the Sender header

[James Ralston]

On 2006-07-12 at 12:19-04 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

> On Jul 12, 2006, at 11:54 AM, James Ralston wrote:
> 
> > As a follow-up to the Sender header discussion back on
> > 2006-04/05...
> > 
> > On 2006-06-17, we disabled Sender header rewriting at our site,
> > using the attached patch.
> > 
> > Since then, we've received no complaints whatsoever from our users
> > about bounces not being caught, and the complaints about
> > recipients using Outlook seeing "bounce" addresses have ceased.
> > 
> > Based on our experiences, I'd strongly recommend that this patch
> > be applied to the official Mailman distribution.
> 
> Thanks for the feedback James.  Have you seen any problems with
> processing legitimate bounces to addresses that don't exist?

Here's our count of bounces without discernable addresses so far for
the year:

    Month     count
    ---------------
    2006-01      10
    2006-02      32
    2006-03      36
    2006-04      32
    2006-05      16
    2006-06      12
    2006-07       6

I'd like to see the data through, say, September before drawing any
firm conclusions, but we definitely have *not* seen any sharp increase
in the number of bounces without discernable addresses.

As an aside, we average about 3,259 bounces per month across all
lists, so having only (e.g.) 12 unrecognized bounces is actually a
very impressive number (about 0.37%).

James