[Mailman-Developers] MM feature request - spread out the pain

[skip at pobox.com]

Perhaps this is on the feature request list already, or better yet, Barry
borrowed Guido's time machine when I wasn't looking, however...

I help administer a number of python.org mailing lists.  MM sends out
subscription reminders on the first of each month.  This inevitably leads to
a huge number of mail bounces many of which MM doesn't understand.  The
python.org postmaster folk then get to go in and manually remove a ton of
email addresses.  (Looks like about 100 this month.  I'm sure other sites
have to handle many more such bounces.)  I don't know how to automate this.
The best thing I can think of to do is to write an Emacs macro which copies
a highlighted email address, pops over to a shell mode window ssh'd into
mail.python.org and runs remove_members with the given address.  That's
still more manual than I would like, but given the variability in bounce
formats that seems about as good as I can do without expending a lot of
effort.

I realize that getting Mailman to grok more rejection notice formats is a
worthwhile goal, however I think it would also be helpful to spread the pain
of invalid email addresses more evenly through the month, at least across
mailing lists but ideally within mailing lists.  Notification day for any
given email might be

    ord(email[0]) % 28 + 1

This would be close enough for gummint work (the 29th, 30th and 31st would
be declared to be postmaster holidays).

-- 
Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.smontanaro.net/