[Mailman-Users] Bounces Issue - Revisit II

Dan Busarow dan at dpcsys.com
Fri Dec 17 04:43:22 CET 1999


On Fri, 17 Dec 1999, Allen Bolderoff wrote:
> > I'd comment, but I don't see a description of the problem anywhere.
> > You keep saying "the bounces problem" like we all know what you mean.
> > I don't. 

I have *no* idea if this is what he is talking about but I'll relate
something I came across this week.

I added a new list with ~13K subscribers that used to be processed by
listproc.  The list owner hadn't bothered keeping the list clean, it 
had a *lot* of bogus addresses in it.

It's an announce only list, the owner fired off a message and 5 minutes 
later the machine was running out of swap because of all the python
processes handling bounces.  Only about 1500 messages had gone out
and we had in excess of 100 python's running. (P400 w/ only 64M RAM).

Anyway, what I did was change the aliases so bounces went to a regular
mailbox and had the owner send the message again.  Everything worked fine
this time.

I wrote a perl script to extract the bounce addresses out of the mailbox
and handed the resulting list to remove_members.  So the list is clean(er)
now and I've switched the aliases back.  I don't expect any problems
next time he sends a message.

Maybe worth mentioning in the README?  "If you are importing addresses
from another list manager it might be wise to handle bounces manually
to get the list relatively clean before enabling automatic bounce
handling."

Dan
-- 
 Dan Busarow                                                  949 443 4172
 Dana Point Communications, Inc.                            dan at dpcsys.com
 Dana Point, California  83 09 EF 59 E0 11 89 B4   8D 09 DB FD E1 DD 0C 82





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