[Mailman-Developers] Bounce removal parameters default values

[Greg Stark]

I find I am being removed from mailman mailing lists left and right. I believe
the default values for the bounce removal should be reconsidered. It's
possible that you haven't had many users in my situation and so haven't really
had a chance to tune these parameters on the low end yet. But they clearly
aren't working for me at a few sites.

My particular situation is that my site has seen fit to filter viruses by
refusing delivery. This causes a bounce from the remote MTA every time someone
sends me an Outlook virus. Why my site administrators felt this was necessary
is a question for another day, it's not like I use Outlook or like my spam
filters wouldn't have thrown these messages away anyways, but whatever.

The net result is that some small fraction of messages to me bounce and list
management software notices this. The only reason I became aware of the
problem was because ezmlm also does this type of processing but it sends a
warning message before removing users. It only removes you if the warning
message itself bounces. In fact it sends two such warning messages and only
removes the user if *both* bounce. This provides the user with a chance to
react to the first message and fix the problem -- if they ever see the
message.

I could beg for a similar feature in mailman, but I'm not sure it's necessary.
But I am sure it's necessary to tune the bounce processing parameters. The
relatively few bounces I'm generating shouldn't be causing me to get removed
when all the real messages are being delivered fine.

It seems the legitimate messages that are correctly delivered should reset the
count of bounces to 0. Reading the source it seems it has to see
DEFAULT_MAX_POSTS_BETWEEN_BOUNCES such legitimate posts between messages. I'm
fairly convinced this parameter should always be 0. If any successful delivery
occurs the user should never be removed due to bounces.

What I don't understand is how DEFAULT_MAX_POSTS_BETWEEN_BOUNCES relates to
the parameters I see in the admin. None of the parameters in the admin
corresponds to this. How is it calculated?

-- 
greg