[Mailman-Users] Bounce Processing

[Mark Sapiro]

On 04/19/2016 05:28 PM, Richard Robbins wrote:
> I recently switched my mailman host to a new provider.  One of my users is
> now encountering problems that he hasn't had before.  When he sends a
> message to a list an error message is generated that is in the following
> form:
> 
> From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon at cloud1.emwd.com>
> To: announce-bounces at usml.net
> Cc:
> Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2016 13:09:24 -0400
> Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
> This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
> 
> A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
> recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
...
> When I asked my host about this I was told that this is an SPF
> configuration issue and that the sender needs to adjust relevant DNS
> records.
> 
> The subscriber spoke to his IT person who said that this appears to him to
> be a blacklist issue and that the host needs to make an adjustment.
> 
> Meanwhile, mailman has now removed the subscriber from the mailing list and
> I had to put him back on, but I assume he will be deleted soon.


There are two separate issues here. He cannot send to Mailman and
Mailman can't send to him. The first causes him to get the rejections as
above and the other causes Mailman's bounce processing to unsubscribe him.

As to what you can do, the first question is whether this is your
Mailman installation on say a hosted VPS or similar or Mailman provided
by the host.

If the latter, there's little if anything you can directly do. You can
go to the list's web admin UI and on the Bounce processing page, make
sure that both bounce_notify_owner_on_bounce_increment and
bounce_notify_owner_on_disable are set to Yes. Then every time the
user's bounce score is incremented and when it reaches threshold, the
owner will be sent a notice which includes the reason the mail wasn't
delivered. This may be similar to or different from the notice the user
gets when he sends to the list.

This will at least give you some more information. If as I suspect you
do not control Mailman or the MTA on the host machine, there's probably
nothing you can do to fix this and since the host and the user's support
are pointing fingers at each other, there's not much hope for resolution
there either.

Probably the user should just give up and get a gmail or other freemail
(but not Yahoo or AOL or anyone else that publishes DMARC p=reject)
account to use with the list.

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