[Mailman-Developers] thoughts on bounce processing

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:50 PM -0400 2006-05-11, James Ralston wrote:

>>  Mailman doesn't silently discard bounces.
>
>  It does if bounce_processing is set to "no".

	Ahh.  Sorry, I had missed that part of the issue.

>                                                That's my point: turning
>  off bounce processing should mean "forward the bounces to the list
>  administrator(s)", not "discard bounces".

	s/list administrator(s)/appropriate place/

	In some cases, the list moderator(s) might be the appropriate 
place, in others the original poster will be the appropriate place. 
I think there's some room here for further discussion.

>>  This would imply that the envelope sender is left unmodified by
>>  Mailman, and that could potentially cause problems with things like
>>  SPF or DKIM, which the sender would need to be aware of.
>
>  If the envelope sender is unmodified, then Mailman can't use VERP,
>  which means that the likelihood that the bounce will contain useful
>  information (such as, which address actually bounced) is reduced.  :(

	Not really.  VERP could be used, but then that would require that 
the MTA of the poster would also understand that format.

>  I suppose Mailman could stuff the original envelope sender header into
>  another header (e.g., "X-Mailman-Original-Env-Sender") and then pull
>  it back out when processing a bounce, but that smells rather hackish
>  to me.

	That sort of thing may be the only alternative, if you want to 
have the bounces sent back to the original poster.


	Sending things to the list moderator(s) or administrator(s) would 
be simpler, since you wouldn't have to worry what the original 
envelope sender address was.

	But that would only help you if the original poster was also one 
of the list moderator(s) or administrator(s).

>  Perhaps VERP could be enhanced to encode both the original envelope
>  sender and the recipient?

	The problem is that subscribers might have their own plus-style 
addressing, on top of which we're trying to add VERP, and now you're 
trying to encode both the envelope sender and envelope recipient in 
the VERP.

	That might be theoretically possible, but I think it's going to 
take a lot more thought and design work to see if that can be done. 
I suspect it would be a lot easier to do some of the other sorts of 
things we're talking about.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.