[Mailman-Users] Bounce notifications.

[Mark Sapiro]

Timothy Park wrote:
>
>I'm sorry in advance if I'm not understanding Mailman's bounce notification
>process, but here's my issue:  I've noticed that when a message bounces,
>there are no notications to list owners.  I only stumbled upon this error
>when we created a mailing list for a small group of developers, and one
>wasn't receiving any email due to a problem with his mail server.  I had no
>idea until he told me that he wasn't receiving our messages about a week
>into the project.  When I checked Mailman's bounce log
>(/var/log/mailmain/bounce), the erorr was there, and his bounce score was
>1.0.  Is this the normal action of Mailman's bounce system? That is, to hold
>off notifying the list owner of a bounce until the bounce score passes the
>defined threshold?  If so, is there any way I can force bounce errors to be
>delivered?  I tried disabling bounce processing, but that seems to just
>discard bounced messages without a notification.  Some of our mailing lists
>are "mission critical" where one person not receiving a message could be a
>big deal, so if mailman could let us know when there is a delivery failure,
>that would be wonderful (we wouldn't mind the extra email).  Thanks for your
>help!


Your observations are correct and that's the way bounce processing is
designed to work.

If you want to be notified of every bounce, you have a few choices:

1) Be sure bounce_processing is Yes and bounce_notify_owner_on_disable
is Yes, and set bounce_score_threshold <= 1.0. This will cause a
notice to be sent to the list owner containing the bounce message on
the first bounce. The downside is the member's delivery will also be
disabled, and the owner will then need to re-enable it, unless the
address is truly undeliverable.

2) Change the alias for LISTNAME-bounces to deliver to "owner" instead
of "bounces". This will direct all bounces to the owner, but requires
delivery to Mailman to be via alias and to be truly effective requires
aliases to not be automatically generated.

3) Create a cron to run a few times a day and go through the bounce log
looking for entries like

May 28 05:06:04 2009 (12757) LISTNAME: user at example.com bounce score:
	
with timestamp > than the last run and mail a notice to LISTNAME-owner.

4) Modify the code to do what you want.

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