[Mailman-Users] Re-enabling users who exceed the bouncethreshold

[Mark Sapiro]

Peter Davis wrote:
>
>Is there a fast way?  Is there a way to automatically un-bounce all bouncing
>members?


Without command line access which I gather you don't have, you can do
it by scripting the web interface which leads to the answer below.


>I realize this won't solve the Comcast problem.  These members still won't
>get their messages from the list, but at least if Comcast reopens the gates,
>the mail will flow.


This may be the appropriate response, but here's a story which may or
may not be relevant.

At one point, there was a transient DNS issue affecting reverse lookups
for the server that sends list mail for my production lists. At the
same time, att.net started blocking our server causing all mail to
that domain to bounce. I tried contacting att.net following their
procedures and never got a reply (over a couple of months or more). I
also urged the att.net list members to contact att.net via their
customer support channels. Some did and got some 'we'll refer this to
engineering' type of reply.

Meanwhile, I kept reenabling the bounce disables. Finally, I decided to
let it rest for a week or more, and then when I reenabled delivery,
the block was gone.

Now this may well be a coincidence, but it is also possible that
att.net had a DNS reverse lookup error at the beginning and blocked
the IP. Then each subsequent mail found a 'cached' block and was
itself blocked and also updated the cache expiration. When I stopped
sending for over a week, the cached entry finally expired. This is
conjecture and may not be correct, but I think it is not necessarily a
good idea to keep reenabling bounces like this.


>On another note, I'd like to be able to get a list of all the subscribers
>with comcast.net addresses, so I can write to them off-list.  I'd settle for
>a list of all subscribers, which I can then filter with grep.  But I don't
>see any way to get a full list, other than by asking the host site
>administrators nicely, and hoping for the best.


See
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.062.htp>
for links to scripts that can scrape the admin interface for
membership. In particular, my updated version of Jim Tittsler's
mailman-subscribers.py script can obtain essentially all the admin
Membership List info in a flat file that can be grepped to obtain all
members in a particular domain or all bounce disabled members, etc.
There is also a script on Jim's linked page that can reset the
'hidden' flag for a list of members. This could be easily modified to
enable delivery instead.

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