[Mailman-Users] Mailman not recognizing some bounces?

[Mark Sapiro]

skip at pobox.com wrote:
>
>I've been working on the SpamBayes filtering on mail.python.org for a couple
>weeks.  Now that the training database has matured a bit for the most part
>the unsures I see now seem to be bounce messages for a handful of mailing
>list subscribers which Mailman doesn't handle automatically.


I don't understand. Are you talking about the incoming message to
listname-bounces at example.com or the unrecognized bounce notification
from Mailman to the list owner?

If it's the incoming message, Mailman hasn't had a chance to recognize
it yet, and any changes to Mailman's bounce recognition isn't going to
affect what your Bayes filter sees.


>The most
>problematic domains are rediffmail.com, big.or.jp, 163.com, ospaz.ru and
>126.com.  The bounce messages from 163.com and 126.com (and I think
>big.or.jp) are written in the native character sets (Chinese or Japanese),
>so I can understand if Mailman doesn't recognize them.  I'm not sure what
>the problem is with the others.
>
>Is this a known issue with Mailman?  Are there workarounds?  We're running
>2.1.10.


It is a known issue in that

1) Many MTA's do not send RFC 3464 compliant DSNs
2) We do our best to recognize non-compliant DSN's, but humans are
   better at it than is code, so there will always be 'unrecognized'
   bounces.
3) We make no attempt to recognize any language other than English.

If you send me example DSNs from the above domains, I can try to add
recognition for them. I tried mailing to
bogus_address_test_dsn at rediffmail.com,
bogus_address_test_dsn at big.or.jp, bogus_address_test_dsn at 163.com,
bogus_address_test_dsn at ospaz.ru and bogus_address_test_dsn at 126.com to
see if I could get DSN's from these domains, but rediffmail.com,
163.com and 126.com rejected the recipient at SMTP time and the others
accepted the mail and haven't yet returned a DSN.

The best 'workaround' as far as recognizing DSNs in Mailman is
concerned is to enable Mailman's VERP options

VERP_PASSWORD_REMINDERS = Yes
VERP_PERSONALIZED_DELIVERIES = Yes
VERP_DELIVERY_INTERVAL = 1

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