[Mailman-Users] help request: new 1300 member list results in mostly bounces

[Nathan]

Hello.

I'm new to mailman. I've used it to setup an announce-only list for a 
friend who has over 1300 addresses. Up to this point, she's been simply 
sending to her entire AOL address book (as this user/account is setup 
specifically for people who want to receive announcements about her 
studio). You can imagine the headaches she has sending that way.

So I setup a mailman list. Her webhost has mailman included with her 
account, so I didn't have to install. I sent a few test messages to 
just her and a couple of my accounts to make sure they were being 
moderated, and that they went out properly once approved before mass 
subscribing the other addresses. These messages went out without issue.

So, I mass subscribed the other 1300+, and she sent out the first email 
today. If mailman has a way for the administrator to investigate 
bounces, I don't know about it, but some time after she'd sent the 
message out, she and I still had not received it, so I tried to 
investigate. I logged in and looked up our user info and found that 
each of us had a "bounce score of 1". From my reading and simple math, 
this means that the 1 message sent out resulted in a hard bounce.

To get a sampling of other users, I clicked on "G" for all emails 
beginning with g. Of those 30 subscribers, 29 had bounced. Only one 
subscriber at the domain nyce.net had a bounce score of 0. The other 
domains:
email.com
@hotmail.com
@hotmail.com
@hotmail.com
@comcast.net
@hotmail.com
@eclipse.net
@verizon.net
@comcast.net
@optonline.com
@hotmail.com
@nc.rr.com
@pershing.com
@msn.com
@ureach.com
@yahoo.com
@lycos.com
@gmail.com
@yahoo.com
@comcast.net
@pabla.net
@hotmail.com
@usinter.net
@pcisvision.com
@earthlink.net
@gmail.com
@msn.com
@yahoo.com
@aol.com

Any advice as to why this is happening? I'm assuming the problem is NOT 
with mailman itself, but possibly with her webhost (maybe flagged as a 
spammer by other hosts?). For what it's worth, one other address to 
which the email did get through was my mac.com address. I noticed in my 
mac.com web interface that the message showed that it had an 
attachment, but there was no evidence of that attachment once I clicked 
through to read the mail. She's sending from AOL, and it does appear 
that html was included, so maybe the attached file is the html 
document?

I am not her usual web person, so don't have a lot of other info, or a 
way to take it up directly with the host, however I'm sure I could 
speak with him and get whatever info is necessary, but at the moment, I 
don't even know what to ask. Since mailman handles the bounces 
automatically, I don't even know how to go about figuring out what 
caused them.

Also, is there a way to send out a test message to only a few members 
of the group? If this were the case, I could try to troubleshoot by 
sending a message from my account rather than hers, using plain text, 
etc.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Nathan