[Mailman-Developers] suggested improvement for Mailman's bounce processing

[Brad Knowles]

At 5:36 PM -0400 2006-07-28, James Ralston wrote:

>  I admit that this algorithm isn't perfect.  But I think it's better
>  than what Mailman does currently, which is to ignore the status field
>  entirely.

Unfortunately, there are a whole host of seriously broken MTAs out 
there, and seriously broken configurations of otherwise good MTAs, 
and many sites return totally bogus status codes.

If everyone read and understood the RFCs half as well as you have 
done, then there wouldn't be any problem.  But that's not what 
happens.  In many cases, site admins will blindly copy stuff from 
somewhere else that was horribly broken to begin with and won't 
understand what's wrong with it before they do the cut-n-paste 
operation.


That said, I would not be opposed to seeing more data on this 
subject, and possibly giving site admins or list admins an option 
they can enable that would allow Mailman to pay attention to the 
status codes.

Once that's out there, we could let various people try it out and see 
how it works in the field, and I would be a very happy guy if I were 
to be proven wrong in this case.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.