[Mailman-Developers] Bounce processing and remote list administrators

[John Viega]

On Mon, Jun 15, 1998 at 07:12:32PM +0300, Janne Sinkkonen wrote:
> 
> Well, I'm not sure it's quite as smooth as it could be.
> 
> Our network connection tends to go down for the weekend because of a
> broken router needing (ir)relegular reboots. This happened on Sunday
> once again, and this time the remote listowner got over 100MB worth of
> error messages. His ISP will filter the trash out of his mailbox for
> tomorrow, hopefully.
> 
> Furthermore, about 150 of roughly 800 members were kicked out of the
> list because of 'excessive or fatal bounces'. The network was down
> for about 24 hours. (Our bounce parameters may be too tight, of
> course.)
>  
> I haven't seen the variety of the generated messages yet.
> 
> Even if this were 'normal' in the sense that there are no
> message-generating loops, some kind of solution is needed to prevent
> excessive or fatal mail bombing of the listowners.
> 

Wow.  Is the field, "Minimum number of days an address has been
non-fatally bad before we take action" set to 1 or 0 for that list?
If not, either something got generated that was treated as a fatal
bounce, or there's a bug in the bounce handling.  Neither would
surprise me too much.  Like Barry said, though, we should switch to
treating all bounces as non-fatal; it will simplify bounce processing
a bit.

John