[Mailman-Users] Many users unsubscribed at once (not by me)

[Hal]

On 13/12/2015 15:53, Laura Creighton wrote:


> What is more likely is that a member of your list,
> posts something to the list.  Then mailman tries to deliver the mail
> to all the subscribers.  When it calls up some_site asking to deliver
> mail to subscribers who have subscribed from accounts on some_site,
> some_site says something to the effect of:
>
> Drop dead.  We are protecting our users from receiving mail from
> you!  No matter how many times you ask us to send mail to them,
> we _won't_ because _we don't like you and your crappy mailing list_.

So "some_site" in your example are all the mail servers around the world 
which REFUSE to receive the posting(s) from my mailing list, and thus 
sends an error message back to my list server's Mailman software.

And as these error messages on my list-server start piling up from 
various mail servers around the world (i.e. "some_site") Mailman says 
"OK, enough! The LIST-MEMBER sending those messages has to be banned as 
messages from him won't receive a vast majority of the other list 
members anyway, so I'll remove him so it won't happen again".

Have I more or less understood it correctly?



> So you need to check your logs and find out if there is a some_site,
> or more than one some_site which really doesn't like you.

OK, I'll ask the server-admin/owner about the logs as I'm not sure where 
they are or how to access them. Which logs specifically are we looking 
for as I'm sure there are many?

I assumed I would get an error message (email) for every time a posting 
didn't reach the list but the latest "bounce action notification" I have 
is from 5 months back, so apparently not. Maybe I've messed with some 
settings in the Mailman web control panel as I kept getting so many of 
them and didn't know what to do about it all.



> The usual reasons for disliking you are:
>
> 1. We hate your IP, you have bad reputation with us, maybe you have been
>     reported as a spammer someplace, or maybe you just send us a lot of
>     mail and we don't like that.

Again, this is the IP address of certain LIST-MEMBERS, right, and not my 
list-server?

Does this also mean that the same receiving mail-servers will refuse 
email sent from the same LIST-MEMBER, but sent directly (i.e. outside of 
my mailing list)?



> Mailman cannot do anything about this problem.  Talking to the site that
> hates you can, if the site that hates you is willing to talk to you at
> all about the problem.  Large sites, like aol typically do not.

I don't have the capacity nor time to contact every single email 
provider refusing to receive messages from certain list members.




> 2.  We have a DMARC policy which is designed as follows:
>
>      If mail comes in that originates from a user on one of our sites,
>      and it doesn't come in on one of our servers, we will call this spam
>      and refuse to deliver it.
>
> The big offenders here are aol and yahoo.  This policy breaks every
> mailing list on the planet.
>
> A user on yahoo.com sends mail to a mailing list, and the list tries
> to send it to all the subscribers, and when it tries for all the other
> subscribers at yahoo.com, yahoo says, 'This mail that supposedly
> came from user at yahoo.com, didn't come from one of our servers. Do
> not deliver.'

Ouch! So it won't accept the email because my list-server PASSES ON a 
message, and that IP address is obviously not the same as that of the 
LIST MEMBER posting that message in the first place?




> If this is your problem, and we think it is, you need a mailman
> at least 2.16 and 2.18 is better.

I'll contact my server-owner/admin to upgrade the Mailman software.
I see from the Mailman site (http://www.list.org/) that version 2.1.20 
is the latest version, and there's version 3.01 as well ("Show don't 
tell", whatever that means).
Is 2.18 the latest stable version?




Then we can tell you how to
> configure it to rewrite things so that your mailing list mesages
> no longer appear to come from their senders, so yahoo doesn't
> reject them, but does let people reply to such messages and
> have the reply go to the real sender, at yahoo or wherever
> the way that you expect.

I know many list-owners prefer to have messages reply back to the poster 
of the message instead of the list itself (I've read those discussions 
many times though I forget why), but for my list I'm sure this would 
mean A LOT of list discussions done outside of the list, which in turn 
defeats the purpose of my list (sharing information).



> Does this make sense?

Certainly more than a couple of days ago! Thanks for explaining :-)


Hal