[Mailman-Users] Uncaught Bounce Notification

[Mark Sapiro]

Grant Taylor wrote:

>On 02/13/2009 07:29 PM, Jeff Grossman wrote:
>> I received a uncaught bounce notification from one of my lists today. 
>>  The bounce looks pretty normal, and figured it should have been 
>> caught by the bounce system.  How do I report bounce formats that did 
>> not get caught by the bounce system?
>
>Though it would be nice for Mailman to recognize this bounce format and 
>automatically process it, I am questioning if this particular bounce 
>should be acted upon or not.


That question hinges on whether or not the bounce should be considered
a permanent or a temporary failure. The bounce itself says "This is a
permanent error."


>Seeing as how this bounce was generated because the recipient was over 
>quota "User's Disk Quota Exceeded", I wonder what the appropriate thing 
>to do is.  This is (IMHO) *very* likely to be a transient / temporary 
>error.


I disagree. I think it is likely to be an abandoned account, but in any
case, with default bounce processing settings, The user's delivery
won't be disabled until a bounce like this is received on 5 separate
days.


>As such I'm not sure that I would want to act on this particular 
>error.  However if a bunch of these errors happened, then I might want 
>to take action.
>
>So I'm not sure if this is where the number of bounces (before something 
>is done) comes in to play, or what.  Just something to think about.


Exactly.

Also note that the message also said "Your message totalled  23 Kbytes.
However a small (< 1Kb) message will be delivered should
you wish to inform your recipient you tried to email."

So probably when we disable the user's delivery after 5 days of
bounces, the disabled notice we send to the user might be accepted,
and with default settings, the user won't be unsubscribed until 3
weeks and two more notices later.

Granted, this could be a user on an extended vacation (over a month),
but in that case, ultimately unsubscribing the user is easy to reverse
and is small penalty for the user's forgetting to disable list
delivery.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan