[Mailman-Developers] Missed Bounce Message

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Nov 30, 1999 at 01:29:57PM -0800, jfesler@gigo.com wrote:
>[I'm also highly in favor of the at-password-time bounce checking - keeps
>load light-ish for most list traffic, and just the occasional
>reminder/probe]

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, but are you going to kick them off after
one bounce, or wait several months before kicking them off?  Or would a
failure of that message cause probes to begin being sent, or the address
to be marked as "suspect" and use VERPs for delivery?

I'm imagining something like a binary search.  You *CAN* use a header or
VERP while still sending batches, you just have to realize that a VERP
is associated with a particular SET of addresses.  You mark these as
suspect, and future deliveries to these addresses aren't batched.
The back-off time on these addresses being marked as suspect can be
relatively low, but probably should be by number of messages sent, not
by hours (for low volume lists).  Maybe 3 messages or less.

So, if you have three addresses bouncing from among 10k addresses, and
your chunk size is 20, you only send out about an extra 150 messages
to determin exactly where the bounce is.

This seems more efficient than sending probes regularly (particularly for
huge lists), and more pro-active than waiting till the end of the month.

I'd be interested in working on such a thing.  My question though is,
what's the preferred way to do this?  A header line (which may be
truncated by some MTAs), a unique envelope sender (which requires some
support from the *LOCAL* MTA, and qmail and sendmail do it differently)?

Sean
-- 
 Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
URL: <http://www.tummy.com/xvscan> HP-UX/Linux/FreeBSD/BSDOS scanning software.