[Mailman-Users] Using mailman to take care of mailer-demons

[Jon Carnes]

>
> > Other bounces (that come back in a non-standard format that Mailman
can't
> > interpret), will be posted to the admin for handling (assuming you have
the
> > list set so that only members or admin's can post).  These messages are
> > stored in ~mailman/data/..
>
> How do you define "other bounces"? Would a normal e-mail sent to the
> address go into this category?
>
> In that case, it doesn't work exactly like I want it to - normal e-mails
> sent to the address should not be changed, they should just be "bounced"
> to a defined address so he/she can take care of replying to the e-mail.
>
> Thanks.
>
> - Morten.

Some email systems send "bounces" from some weird addresses (as apposed to
Mailer-Daemon, or some such address).  As such, Mailman may not be able to
interpret that the email is a bounce.  Mailman may simply interpret the mail
as a reply.  There is a whole section in Mailman that is devoted to
identifying different types of bounces.  The current list includes bounces
from: Compuserve, Exim, Groupwise, Microsoft, Netscape, Postfix, SMTP,
Smail, Yahoo, etc...

But folks use a wild number of differing Mailservers (like Lotus Notes,
Connect2, etc...).  If they don't use a standard "bounce" format, and the
bounce format they use has not been added to ~mailman/Mailman/Bouncers/..
then the message that comes back is seen as a reply from a user that is not
on the list.

You will have to monitor the messages that come back into the list.  It's
really not too hard.  If a non-list user replies to every single message
that goes out in a day (assuming a high volume list), that user is probably
a bounce.  The hard part can be tracing down the actual email address on
your list that is causing the bounce....

Hope this help - Jon Carnes