[Mailman-Users] excessive bounces bug

[Travis Derouin]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your reply!

On 2/18/06, Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net> wrote:
> Travis Derouin wrote:
> >
> >I run a mailing list for a daily how-to newsletter for eHow.com.
> >Today, at least a few of us subscribed to the list, including myself,
> >received a false warning:
> >
> >"Your membership in the mailing list eHow has been disabled due to
> >excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated
> >18-Feb-2006.  You will not get any more messages from this list until
> >you re-enable your membership.  You will receive 3 more reminders like
> >this before your membership in the list is deleted."
>
>
> You say it is a false warning. Does that mean you got the warning but
> your subscription delivery wasn't actually disabled, or that delivery
> was disabled but shouldn't have been?
>

The delivery was disabled but shouldn't have been.

>
> >This is definitely in error since I, and other people in our
> >organization, have been receiving the daily e-mail that is sent to our
> >list successfully. Can anyone explain why this would happen?
>
>
> Are you the list owner? Do you have the Bounce processing
> notifications, particularly bounce_notify_owner_on_disable, set to
> Yes? If so, the owner should receive a notice at the same time the
> user receives the above notice. The owner's notice will include a copy
> of the bounce message that triggered the disable which will help you
> see why this is happening.

I am the list owner, but there have been at least 2 non-list owner
addresses that have also received this same message, when their
addresses shouldn't have been disabled.  Bounce processing was
enabled,  bounce_notify_owner_on_disable is yes.

>
> >Currently, to avoid having a mass panic and unsubscription from our
> >list, the best route I see is to include an apology for this false
> >warning to our users in our next newsletter and disable automatic
> >bounce processing to prevent this from happening again.
>
>
> Rather than disable bounce processing, you might just alter settings
> such as bounce_info_stale_after to be more agressive about discarding
> old bounce info.

Possibly, but it doesn't make any sense why our e-mail addresses are
bouncing when we are really receiving the e-mail that is sent out, so
I don't have much confidence that this will fix things.

> You can also go through the membership list and see how many members
> are disabled by bounce. If you have command line access to your
> Mailman, you can use 'bin/list_members --nomail=bybounce' to get this
> info.
>

Ok, apparently 1457 members out of 6327 are disabled, this number
seems quite high. 585 of them are gmail addresses, 602 of them are aol
addresses, which accounts for most of the disabled addresses. The rest
of them vary. Does that shed light on what might be happening?

By disabling bounce processing, will this  ignore the previous
disabling of addresses, since the recipients haven't received the
remaining 3 reminders (sounds like a tongue twister)?

Thanks!
Travis