[Mailman-Users] Soft bounces....

[Brad Knowles]

on 4/2/09 2:54 PM, Charles Gregory said:

> Yahoo expects me to respond promptly to 5xx bounces, disabling any 
> subscriptions, otherwise it starts generating 'greylist' 4xx bounces for 
> my mail. Unfortunately, if I try to lower the bounce threshold, the 
> now-daily occurence of 4xx bounces guarantees that all yahoo addresses 
> will end up disabled. Is there any way, short of fiddling with and 
> recompiling from source, to separate 'hard' bounce handling from 'soft' 
> bounce handling, or to change the 'scores' that each accumulates?

Thing is, Mailman doesn't see the 5xx or 4xx codes directly.  It hands 
the messages off to your MTA, and your MTA sees those codes.

A 5xx permanent failure should result in a pretty much immediate bounce 
from your MTA back to Mailman.  But by default, Mailman is only going to 
count one bounce per day per recipient.

Your MTA may hold onto the messages in the queue for many hours or days 
before a message is sent back to Mailman informing it of the delay of a 
message resulting from a 4xx temporary failure.


Since we do not, and we cannot, have direct access to the 5xx versus 4xx 
response codes from Yahoo!, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to try 
to modify the code to treat a bounce resulting from a permanent 5xx 
response code any different from a "delayed message" notice resulting 
from a temporary 4xx response code.

> Or any other trick to handle bounces properly when yahoo is tossing out 
> greylist deferrals. At this point is just amounts to a nuisance with 
> delayed deliveries for a lot of list mail. But it would be better to 
> have our mailman properly disable when 5xx errors occur....

Set up your MTA to handle Yahoo! separately from other sites, so that 
any slow downs there don't slow you down in getting to other domains, 
and vice-versa.

-- 
Brad Knowles
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