[Mailman-Users] Dealing with rate limiting from Roadrunner/Time Warner

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Conrad G T Yoder writes:

 > Has anyone had to deal with bounces due to rate limiting from
 > Roadrunner/Time Warner?

Are these true bounces (ie, permanent delivery failures) or just the
temporary failures due to rate limiting, causing delays of many hours
or days in delivery?

 > http://postmaster.rr.com/spam#ratelimit
 > 
 > If so, what did you do to resolve the problem?  (That is, if things
 > “got resolved.”)

Haven't had a problem (RR is on the list of "if you don't like losing
mail, don't do that" mailboxes for my lists).

 > My hosting provider, DreamHost, continues to assert this is my
 > problem and not theirs.

This may be partly true, if you are falling afoul of the "too many
recipients per message" limit.  In that case, if the option is
available, then you should set personalization on for lists will more
than a very few RR subscribers.  If not, see "full of" below.

 > I of course do not have control of the Mailman installation and/or
 > the server.

NightmareHost is full of s--t.  The fundamental problem is RR's
policy.  They implicitly say "we don't care if our users get their
mail,"[1] and they reserve the right to arbitrarily refuse delivery no
matter what you do.  That may be your problem, but there's nothing
you can do about it.

It's true that you *may* have a mitigation option in personalization,
but that is under control of NightmareHost.  If they do not permit you
to personalize, there's nothing under your control that you can do.
All the other mitigation strategies (whitelisting, feedback loop)
involve the participation of NightmareHost AFAICS, since RR rate
limits on the basis of IP, which is owned by NightmareHost, I assume,
and the limit on recipients per SMTP connection is in mm_cfg.py, which
is not under your control at all.

Does NightmareHost offer you any advice?  Or are they just saying "if
you don't like our service, find another one?"  I think "find another
one" is a great idea, personally.

Sorry I can't be more optimistic.


Footnotes: 
[1]  This is generally true of the big services.  They deliberately
accept the tradeoff of unreliable delivery of desired mail in return
for less spam.  They prefer not to spin it that way, but that's what
they do.