[Mailman-Users] Subscriptions being disabled

[Larry Stone]

On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Robert Boyd Skipper wrote:

> Ok.  Here is another problem.
>
> Today, I found that the subscriptions of twenty or so members have been disabled for
> excessive bounces.  The message accompanying each disabled subscription is:
>
> ":fail: Domain skipperweb.org has exceeded the max emails per hour. Message discarded.
>
> Now, this is odd, because there seems to have been only one message sent out for the
> whole day.

The message seems pretty self-explanatory to me. It sounds like your
provider limits you to a certain number of outgoing messages per hour and
you've exceeded it.

Depending on how you have mailman configured and how your your provider
counts e-mails (by message or by recipient), one e-mail to the list will
generate one or more outgoing messages. If you have VERP or full
personalization turned on, then each message to the list will generate one
outgoing message for each recipient.

For example, with VERP on, if you have 120 members, then you generate 120
outgoing messages. If the limit is 100 per hour, then at least 20 of them
will bounce (the exact number will depend on how many other outgoing
messages you've sent that hour for other reasons, e.g., you message to
this list).

> I did not receive any previous bounce notifications from these
> addresses, so if they are bouncing something with my listname on it, it
> isn't coming back to me in any way that I can find it.
...
> I have bounce processing turned on.  The bounce_score_threshold is set
> for 5.0.

With bounce processing turned on, you don't get notified until the bounce
threshold is exceeded. Until then, the bounces get logged in the Mailman
bounce log but that's it. So all of them have bounced five times before
you were notified.

-- Larry Stone
   lstone19 at stonejongleux.com