[Mailman-Users] Understanding Bounces

[Bill Moseley]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 03:03:50PM +0900, Jim Tittsler wrote:
> I confess I wonder about your real goal.  Just making it to the
> user's mail server doesn't mean the user got the message.  For
> that matter, their opening it and reading it doesn't mean it
> in some cases. :-)

That's very true.  It really true for me.

This is what brought up the issue:  

I have one list, for example, with only about 20 subscribers.  It's
used for important announcements more than general discussion.  The
other day there was an announcement of a meeting time change and one
person didn't get the message.  It turned out we had the wrong
address entered in mailmain so they missed the message and we (list
admins) didn't know that the address was rejected.

So that made me wonder:

1) how can the list admin check mailmain to see what addresses are
bouncing for a given list.

2) how can the list admin get a notification right away of rejected or
bounced addresses.

Of course you can't be sure anyone will read the message -- best you
can do is get their mail server to accept the message (ignoring
receipt notification and other annoying things like that).

But in this case this person's MTA actually told us that the message
couldn't be delivered so it was our fault that we didn't get the
message to them on time.


I just created a list with three emails.  Sent a few messages it all
worked fine.  Then I removed one of the addresses from my aliases file
and the MTA logs show that when mailmain attempts to deliver the
message I see:  "Unrouteable address" for that address.

I even watched with etherreal and could see the reject from the MTA.

I assume mailmain is tracking that reject some place.  But where?

Oh, and now I just set "Try to figure out error messages
automatically?" to "no" and sent another message, saw the reject in
the MTA logs but didn't receive any notification from Mailmain.

Doesn't seem to be working like I expected.

Thanks,





> 

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org