[Mailman-Users] Bounce-handling question

[Greg Ward]

Hi all --

I'm trying to figure out why a particularly unreliable address has not
been disabled by Mailman yet.  As near as I can tell (mostly by looking
at Exim's retry database), the mail server for this user's domain has
not been working since late October: either it answers and fails with
"452 4.4.5 Insufficient disk space; try again later", or it simply
refuses the SMTP connection request.  In either case, mail to this user
sits in our local Exim queue for four days until our Exim times it out
and sends the bounce message to Mailman.

Mailman has certainly been getting these bounce messages; here's an
excerpt from ~mailman/logs/bounce:

Nov 07 18:17:02 2001 (24867) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - first
Nov 08 02:24:01 2001 (27027) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - 3 more allowed over 402780 secs
Dec 09 10:55:01 2001 (29717) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - first
Dec 09 10:55:01 2001 (29717) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - 2 more allowed over 345599 secs

The weird thing is that around 11am on Dec 9, there were a *lot* of
these bounces -- presumably all the list traffic for the last four
days.  Mailman logged them all:

bounce:Dec 09 10:55:02 2001 (29717) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - 2 more allowed over 345599 secs
bounce:Dec 09 10:55:02 2001 (29717) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - 2 more allowed over 345599 secs
bounce:Dec 09 10:55:02 2001 (29717) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - 2 more allowed over 345599 secs
bounce:Dec 09 10:55:02 2001 (29717) mems-talk: nychang at yam.com - 2 more allowed over 345599 secs
[...dozens more skipped...]

However, it never disabled the subscription.

In fact, Mailman hasn't disabled *anything* since Nov 20, despite plenty
of bounces.  Hmmm.

Ideas?  Clues?  Advice?

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                gward at mems-exchange.org
MEMS Exchange                            http://www.mems-exchange.org