[Mailman-Users] "Bounce action notification" emails for subscribes/unsubscribes

[Mark Sapiro]

On 10/02/2017 05:37 PM, Terry . wrote:
> 
> I don’t understand why either.  Maybe the address is supposed to exist in Exim, and not be visible via cPanel's interface (e.g. under "Forwarders").  But it makes me wonder whether everything will work as designed with Mailman under the current version of cPanel (11.66.0.23).


cPanel's Mailman is a kludge. Many things don't work as a non-cPanel
Mailman user would expect.  This is a result of cPanel's patches that
allow lists of the same name in different domains to exist in a single
Mailman installation. This in turn is necessary for them to be able to
offer Mailman in more or less turnkey, multi-domain hosting environments
which in the long run has been good for Mailman by allowing hosting
services to offer Mailman to not highly sophisticated customers.

Unfortunately it has also led to a number of situations where Mailman is
available to a customer of a cPanel hosting service, whose admins have
no interest in supporting Mailman.

The most major change in cPanel is the list name. A list named mylist in
the example.com domain is really named mylist_example.com and a list
named mylist in the example.net domain is really named mylist_example.net.

This leads to confusion and some minor things like Sibling lists either
not working or requiring apparent list addresses like
mylist_example.com at example.com.

For the ordinary email case, the Exim Mailman router knows to deliver
mail to mylist(-*)@example.com to the mylist_example.com list and mail
to mylist(-*)@example.net to the mylist_example.net list.

However, this all breaks down with 'mailman at example.com' because there
is only one 'mailman' site list and its name is 'mailman', not
'mailman_example.com'.

Thus, since this used to work, something has changed in cPanel's Exim
config so that mail with envelope from mailman-bounces at example.com is no
longer deliverable because mailman-bounces at example.com is not a valid
address (mailman-bounces at the.canonical.host.domain might be).

However, I'm confused because I know there are a couple of cPanel
Mailman hosting services who's admins are on this list and are very
conscientious, and they don't seem to see this issue.


> If I create a new list (e.g. bugtest3 at mydomain.com, as I did today), the only forwarder that cPanel creates (and allows me to see) is: owner-bugtest3 at mydomain.com which forwards emails to bugtest3-owner at mydomain.com.


This "forwarder" is a kludge to allow mail to
owner-bugtest3 at mydomain.com to be delivered to the bugtest3 at mydomain.com
owner because someone at cPanel thinks that that address should work
that way even though Mailman itself only exposes
bugtest3-owner at mydomain.com ad an owner address.

As I said, normal mail delivery to list addresses is handled by cPanel's
Mailman router, not by aliases or "forwarders"


> If any emails actually get sent to mailman-bounces at mydomain.com, then I assume they'll end up in my catchall at mydomain.com mailbox, (whether I have the "Default Address" set to that catchall address, or I have a forwarder forwarding emails from mailman-bounces at mydomain.com to some mailbox), right???  I assume mailman isn't going to look in that catchall mailbox for anything, so do those emails still get processed because of what Mark said about Exim?


I think all the above is correct. As far as Mailman processing those
bounces is concerned, they are normally just forwarded to the site list
owner. If they go to your catchall address instead, that's probably better.


> I received a couple of "Bounce action notification" emails this week, due to list members' mailboxes being over quota, and they seemed to come through to me OK.  They were sent from "MyListName [mailman-bounces at serverxyz.mywebhost.com] on behalf of mailman at somedomain.com" to mylistname-owner at mydomain.com.
> 
> Is there anything else I can test to ensure all is working OK in regard to administrative addresses which mailman receives emails at?


I'm sure the admin addresses for your lists work just fine. You can test
by sending mail to them. -bounces is problematic, but -owner should go
to the owner and -request, -confirm, -subscribe (-join), -unsubscribe
(-leave) should all send some kind of reply.

It's only 'mailman-bounces' (and other 'mailman' list addresses) that's
problematic.

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