[Mailman-Users] Preventing address from being unsubscribed

[Richard Barrett]

At 14:49 04/07/2003, Ed Leafe wrote:
>On Friday, July 4, 2003, at 03:08  AM, Richard Barrett wrote:
>
>>If I can paraphrase what I think you have said; some messages sent to 
>>subscribers of the subordinate list bounce and these bounce messages are 
>>being returned to the superior list with information indicating they were 
>>bounced by the subordinate list's email address.
>
>         Yes.
>
>>I think you are asking for a means for the superior list to selectively 
>>ignore those bounce messages.
>
>         Either that, or to intercept the subscription disabling process 
> so that the address is not disabled.
>
>>A more pertinent question would be be why is the superior list 
>>should/would be seeing those bounce messages.
>
>         My thoughts exactly. Occasionally I have had bounce messages sent 
> by other servers back to some address other than the address in the 
> Return-Path: header - some have gone back to the list, some to the 
> list-owner, etc. IOW, something screwy in one of the thousands of servers 
> I send mail to.

I have heard that, in contravention of RFC 2821, some MTA may do this but 
see my comments below.

>>If the messages your script chooses to pass down to the subordinate list 
>>are simply posted by it to the subordinate list then any bounce from the 
>>subordinate list's subscribers should be received by and handled by the 
>>subordinate list's bounce processing; and MM doesn't normally tell 
>>posters about bounces resulting from distribution of their posts by the list.
>>
>>Are you certain that the bounce messages do not actually stem from 
>>occasional failure of your script to take successful delivery of a 
>>message from the superior list?

So how is your script, having had the message from the superior lists 
delivered to it by your MTA, sending the message to the subordinate list. 
Are you using SMTP from your script or are you using the $prefix/bin/inject 
script or something else?

If you are using SMTP (or inject'ing into the default incoming queue) then 
by the time MM has received the message from the MTA and then processed the 
message through the subordinate list:

1. the envelope From should be the subordinate.listname-bounces alias

2. the Sender: header should be subordinate.listname alias

3. the Error-to: header should be subordinate.listname-bounces alias

4. The envelope To and To: header should be that of the subordinate list 
subscriber

5. The From: header should be that of the poster to the superior list, 
superior.listname alias, the subordinate.listname alias or some other 
explicit address depending on the settings of the reply_goes_to_list and 
reply_to_address attributes of the superior and subordinate lists.

This being so it is difficult to see (even with an 
not-quite-RFC-conformant-MTA along the way) how a bounce message in respect 
of a message coming from the subordinate list is finding its way back to 
the superior list, with the subordinate list identified as the address to 
which the message was sent.

>         I grep'd the logs on my server, and couldn't find any entries for 
> the proxy address that didn't have "status=sent" on the line.
>
>      ___/
>     /
>    __/
>   /
>  ____/
>  Ed Leafe
>  http://leafe.com/
>  http://opentech.leafe.com

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Richard Barrett                                      http://www.openinfo.co.uk