[Mailman-Users] Mailman 2.1.11 final has been released.

[Hank van Cleef]

The esteemed Mark Sapiro has said:
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> The release notes and NEWS file for Mailman 2.1.11 contains the
> following innocuous looking item.
> 
> ~    - Improved bounce loop detection and handling in BounceRunner.py.
> 
> This actually first appeared in 2.1.11rc2. It turns out this had an
> unintended consequence, but I actually think it is a good thing.
> 
> The unintended consequence is that bounces of password reminders will
> also now go to the site list owner whereas before they were probably
> just ignored or processed as unrecognized bounces to the site list.
> 
> Most of these bounces will probably be for dead addresses where the user
> disabled delivery and forgot about the list and the address died and the
> password reminders have been bouncing for a long time.
> 
> In the longer term, plain text passwords and reminders are going away,
> but in the short term, the site list owner may get a lot of bounced
> password reminders (possibly a whole lot in a large site) on the first
> of the month following installation of this release.
> 
> I think the best way to deal with these is to remove the dead addresses
> from the lists. Once this is done, the number of bounces on an ongoing
> basis should be small.
> 
Mark, I've snipped your message, but it brings up something that is a
problem for us, and maybe "hijacking" your note with a "feature
request."

We have a pattern of having list subscribers set themselves nomail,
and sometime later, close out the ISP account that was used to receive
mail.  We would like to be able to cull out these "moved/left no
address" subscribers.  

Evidently, 2.1.11 will allow me to more-or-less identify those
accounts by telling me which accounts bounced the monthly reminder
e-mail.  It is not too great a task to look at perhaps ten accounts
per month and correlate "nomail by user" with the bounce message.

Over time, dead accounts add up.  Last time I did something about
this, I set all the "nomail" accounts to receive mail, and the bounce
processor killed off close to half the accounts.  This was after eight
years of running.  The problem with that was that I had a hundred or
so users who were still active but who did not want to receive list
mail.  (Many were following the list through reading the archives).

I'm also concerned about this proposed scheme to discontinue montnly
mailings.  It most definitely needs some mechanism whereby a user can
reset or re-obtain their password without moderator intervention.  Our
user base is just plain not password-savvy, and I'm concerned about
the increase in moderator workload if the recovery method is similar
to password resetting by root (the Unix method).

Hank