[spambayes-dev] RE: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

[Barry Warsaw]

I haven't been paying attention to this thread, so I'm probably missing
a lot of context, but...

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 03:09, Seth Goodman wrote:
> > [Seth]
> > > I'm still curious why only a few of the list postings get
> > > distributed with a VERP address and the rest don't.  Any idea on this?
> >
> > It is a feature of Mailman.  It uses VERP so it can detect dead
> > addresses but doesn't always use it in order to conserve bandwidth.
> > How much bandwidth is saved is open for debate.  Mailman has an
> > option to enable VERP for every delivery.
> 
> That's a curious feature, and I agree it is debatable if it saves any
> significant bandwidth.

Mailman will use VERP in a number of places, depending on how its
configured.  Some of the configuration is up to the site admin and some
is up to the list admin.  In general, Mailman can VERP every N posts, if
personalization is turned off.  This is used mostly for more accurate
list membership pruning.

If personalization is turned on, Mailman VERPs every message, since it's
crafting a unique copy for every list recipient anyway.  For the lists
on python.org, we allow list owners to personalize their lists, although
it doesn't appear that spambayes-dev is personalized.  You can tell by
the envelope sender (often copied into an RFC 2822 header by the
terminal MTA -- but not always).  Also, list owners who turn on
personalization usually modify the footers to include links directly to
a user's options page, for ease of unsubscription and such.

> The other odd behavior of this list is that it sets Sender: to the
> return-path, even when it uses a VERP address, rather than the address of
> the list owner.  This makes for a pretty unusual display of originating
> address in the MUA when the return-path is a VERP address.  Is that also
> configurable?

Not without hacking the source.  Really, and MUA should never display
Sender, although there is a very populate he-who-should-not-be-named MUA
that does display this as the From address.  Why, I have no clue because
it's pretty obvious from the RFCs that this isn't intended to be a
displayed header.

I'm not sure how much more we should discuss Mailman on this list, but
email and I'll try to answer any other questions you might have.

-Barry

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