[Mailman-Developers] Bouncing administrative mail

[Janne Sinkkonen]

John Viega <viega@list.org> writes:

> list mail w/ the X-BeenThere header.  It could also be done by adding
> an additional administrative address...

The problem seems to arise from the sender and receiver of the
administrative messages being identical. If 'list-admin' cannot be
reached, a foreign or local MTA generates an error message and 
sends it to 'list-admin'.  I don't see any fool-proof way to resolve
this by including a header for loop detection, because the
nondeliverable message is not necessarily included in an error message
generated by an MTA. If this is true, then another administrative
address is necessarily needed, and it must be always functional when
the list-admin@mailman.site address is functional. That means that it
must be local. It could be the mailman-owner, or a
trashcan. Mailman-owner is a natural alternative, because the
person being responsible of mailman certainly wants to know if a list
administrator has disappeared. 

Now that we are on administrative addresses, another remotely related
feature I would like to see is separation of the address which gets all
the error messages due to nondeliverable list mail from the address
which is mentioned as the place to ask help in case of
trouble. Sorting out pleas for help from the pile of rubbish generated
by MTAs is very tedious. 

-- 
Janne