[Mailman-Users] bounced addresses stays there

[Barry Finkel]

Kirke Johnson <kjohnson at pcc.edu> wrote:

>I have been attempting to test out the bounce processing on a test 
>list and am confused by the results so far. We are running Mailman 
>2.1.9 on RHEL, installed with the OS.
>
>The test list (tsstst) has the following settings:
>
>bounce_score_threshold: 1.0 (originally 5.0)
>bounce_info_stale_after: 7
>bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings: 0 - for immediate removal (originally 3)
>bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings_interval: 7
>
>I have sent four test messages thus far, with an invalid list member 
>"bogus at example.org". The first two tests were on 1/22. The first one 
>detected the bounce and issued the unsubscribe notification that 
>"bogus at example.org has been removed from Tsstst". The member was 
>still listed in the membership list, and did not go away when 
>/usr/lib/mailman/cron/disabled ran the next morning. The second 
>message on the 22nd did not yield a bounce.
>
>Today (still within the 7 day warning interval), I sent two more test 
>messages with the identical results. Running 
>"/usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -n bybounce tsstst" as suggested 
>below produces no output.
>
>Is there another way to examine the counters inside the "black box" 
>to see what is going on? I can conceive of this process dragging on a 
>couple more days before the original disabled_warnings threshhold of 
>3 is reached and the disabled cron job has a final chance to run, if 
>that is even worth doing at this point.

Note that the bounce score will only increase once per day, no matter
how many rejections there are for that address in that day.  Five days
with succesive bounces will result in a bounce score of 5.0,
and if that is the limit, the subscriber will be set to NOMAIL.
It takes an additional three weeks (default) for Mailman to send
a confirmation message back to the subscriber - one per week - until
the address is unsubscribed Mailman to send
a confirmation message back to the subscriber - one per week - until
the address is unsubscribed.

There is a report that you can run.  From the shell script I run every
morning to report on bounces in all my Mailman 2.1.11 lists:

# The get_bounce_info python source came from
#
#     From http://veenet.value.net/~msapiro/scripts/get_bounce_info.py
#
# via a posting to mailman-users on 05/29/2007; I installed the source
# on katydid in
#
#     /usr/lib/mailman/bin/get_bounce_info.py
#
# The following command will give a report for all lists.  The output
# has three lines for each list (as well as messages to stderr), so
# any bounce information is lost in the clutter of all those lists that
# have no subscribers with bounce scores greater than zero.
# 
# /usr/sbin/withlist -a -r get_bounce_info

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994