[Mailman-Users] Bounce Processing Emails

[Brad Knowles]

On 12/11/07, Cyndi Norwitz wrote:

>  Now that my main lists were migrated to Mailman today, I discovered that
>  notifications of bounces are being sent to my catch-all mailbox.  For some
>  reason, MM makes up a To: address.
>
>  Here's an example:
>  immune-bounces+immune=cunews.carleton.ca at immuneweb.org

No, Mailman is not making up this address as a "To:" address.  This 
is an address format known as VERP (search the FAQ Wizard), and this 
is used as the envelope sender address for when you're sending out 
messages from the mailing list known as "immune" to the recipient 
address "immune at cunews.carleton.ca".  What appears to be happening is 
that this recipient address is bouncing, thus causing a bounce 
(a.k.a., "non-delivery notice", or NDN) to be sent back to this VERP 
sender address.

If your MTA understands the VERP format correctly, it should be 
passing back everything with an address of 
"immune-bounces+[insert.whatever.here]@immuneweb.org" back to your 
Mailman installation, where the standard Mailman bounce handling 
mechanism should take care of this problem.

>  Obviously, I can't make email filters for every single one of my
>  subscribers.  But I'd like to see the bounce messages.

Generally speaking, you should let Mailman handle the bounces 
messages automatically.

>  Is there a way to get MM to simply send the bounces to an address I
>  specify, or just to the list-owner which is specified elsewhere?

That's an option you can take, if you decide to omit all the other 
standard aliases that need to be created for Mailman.  You could just 
have all that traffic come back to you directly.


However, your bigger problem is that your ISP needs to configure 
their MTA (postfix, sendmail, whatever) to properly understand VERP 
format so that you have the possibility of having these bounces sent 
back to wherever you want.  Until the MTA is configured properly, and 
the aliases are set up properly, there's nothing else you can do.

It all comes down to your ISP understanding how to operate and manage 
Mailman correctly, as well as understanding how to operate and manage 
all the related parts of an e-mail system.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>