[Mailman-Developers] suggested improvement for Mailman's bounceprocessing

[Mark Sapiro]

Bob Puff wrote:

>Whis may be slightly OT, but I just encountered a major problem with the
>bounce processing on MM 2.16.  Had a large list used for monthly
>announcements.  I realized that since messages only went out once per month, I
>needed to tighten up the default bounce scoring system, so I set it to remove
>the user after 1 bounce (score of 1.0).  The following day, I saw excessive
>CPU load on the box, so I checked into it.  It was unsubscribing everyone from
>the list, saying due to a bounce in 2005, they were being unsubscribed! 


I guess this is really a bug. It is cron/disabled doing the
unsubscribing.

Apparently, back in 2005, everyone bounced once and got a score of 1.0,
probably due to some MTA issue. This bounce info is now stale, but
stale info is not discarded until a subsequent bounce is received -
none were received, so no info was reset, or if a bounce was received
more recently, the old info was discarded and replaced with new info,
still with score = 1.0. So everyone on the list except recent members
who never bounced has a score of 1.0.

Then you set the threshold to 1.0 and triggered the code in
cron/disabled which is there for just this case.

The comment in the code is

        # Find all the members who are currently bouncing and see if
        # they've reached the disable threshold but haven't yet been
        # disabled.  This is a sweep through the membership catching
        # situations where they've bounced a bunch, then the list admin
        # lowered the threshold, but we haven't (yet) seen more bounces
        # from the member.  Note: we won't worry about stale information
        # or anything else since the normal bounce processing code will
        # handle that.

In your case, the last sentence is the gotcha. It looks like we need to
fix that.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan