[Mailman-Users] Bounce message confusion

[Robin Rowe]

Stephen,

> Are _they_ sympathetic, and genuinely trying to help?

Past support at our mailman hosting company (Hostforweb.com) has been 
sometimes stellar and other times merely passable. Depends which tech 
fields our call. Last week was the first time I'd encountered a 
significant attitude problem from their techs.

One "tech" person who doubted my competence had a return address of 
"sales". All the tech names are new people I hadn't seen before. Maybe 
everybody capable is off for the holidays. I'm working through their VP 
now who's been very nice, but it's not very efficient since he's 
non-tech. I expect we'll get it sorted out. It would have saved everyone 
time to drop the attitude, Still, any company can have a bad week.

The problems at my hosting company were compounded by my mistakes. I did 
have this one mailman list pointing to the wrong administrative email 
address and failed to notice I wasn't getting any bounce notifications. 
If I'd been more on top of that I would have seen a problem coming.

I also discovered too late that I lacked a good backup of the list 
names. I'd never planned to use my ISP's backups because I keep my own. 
Unfortunately, while I was down recently with a cold we also had a crash 
of our backup system. I learned that requesting a restore from our 
hosting company on a Saturday was too late. The only backup they make is 
Friday night at 5pm, overwriting last week's backup. (They don't roll.) 
Restore would have been trivial if I had a snapshot that was a week old. 
Nothing that can't be fixed, just more work to do.

On the positive side, I've gotten excellent help here on the 
mailman-users list. You guys are great! I understand mailman much better 
now and should manage it better in the future.

>...what you could do is create a test list
> with just you (and anybody who might be willing to help---not needed
> in this case).  Then when you send something to the main list, about
> 40 minutes later send to the test list.  That should bounce, too....

Thank you, that's brilliant!

Robin