[Mailman-Users] Bounce management and uncaught bounce notifications

Rod@freeserve rod at coate.fsnet.co.uk
Wed Dec 12 14:45:16 CET 2007


Hi

I've just upgraded to Mailman 2.1.9 from a much earlier installation.
One of the new features that puzzles me is the 'uncaught bounce notification'. I get these for out-of-office responses and for auto-replies. 

The auto-replies come from some artificial mailbox address.

The out-of-office responses will come either from an address on my list, or, where the address on my list is itself the address of a list on the remote system, from an individual address on the remote list. A few are addressed to <list>-admin at mydomain.net (as they used to be) and the majority to <list>-bounces at mydomain.net

I have some questions:

Q1    Why are they called 'uncaught' since they have clearly been sent to a Mailman address, and then neatly packaged up by Mailman and sent to me as list and/or site admin? Are they really just 'unrecognizable' possible bounces (as it says in the body of the Mailman email), or am I missing something?

Q2.    Have these responses also been sent to the sender of the message to which they are responses?  
(I don't see how they can have been, as there's nothing in most of the headers relating to the original message)

Q3    Are these responses causing the bounce count for the users to be increased?
(Again, I don't think that this can be the case, because they come back from a different address at the same domain, except possibly for the rare occasion where an out-of-office response comes back from an individual mailbox which is on my list)

Q4    How can I inspect users' bounce counts?

Q5    A small number of mailboxes were automatically set to nomail because of bouncing due to errors on my part (NB these were NOT the ones generating uncaught bounce messages). Mailman's behaviour in this case was reasonable, except (here's the important part) it did NOT send me a message about the suspension. But I have bounce_notify_owner_on_disable set to Yes and bounce_notify_owner_on_unsubscribe_set to Yes. (The same thing used to happen on the antique Mailman installation, but at least there I would get notifications most of the time). Where should I look to find out why these notifications are not reaching me? 

Q6    Again with regard to Q5: 
I've checked my aliases file and it looks OK. Exactly which role in <list>-<role>@mydomain.net should the notifications be coming to?

My main concern is actually Q5, because at present it looks like I need to audit all my mailing lists (more frequently than used to be the case) to check whether users are being dropped without me being notified. But I'd like to understand the other stuff too.

Rod




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