[Mailman-Users] Questions About Uncaught Bounce Notifications

[Richard Damon]

On 7/17/19 8:18 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> On 7/17/19 4:23 PM, David Andrews wrote:
>> I run an installation that has over 300 lists.  Normally, for years, I
>> received around 300 uncaught bounce notifications a day.  In the past
>> couple of months, it has dramatically increased to 3000 to 4000 a day. 
>> Some questions:  what causes them? Can they be reduced? Do they hurt
>> anything? Toes the increase mean a problem somewhere else?
>
> Most likely (you can tell by looking at them) they are spam sent to the
> listname-bounces address. They might also be out of office type
> responses sent by non compliant (RFC 5230) vacation programs or replies
> to list mail erroneously sent to the envelope sender.
>
> What causes them is any message sent to a listname-bounces address that
> is not recognized as a delivery status notification by Mailman's bounce
> processing. At this point actual unrecognized DSNs are very rare, but if
> the message looks like a DSN and is unrecognized, you can post it here,
> and we will try to update the recognizers to recognize it.
>
> You can set a list's Bounce processing ->
> bounce_unrecognized_goes_to_list_owner to No to eliminate the notices
> from that list, but then you will miss any real bounces which are
> unrecognized if there are any.
>
> The only harm is the extra mail to deal with.
>
> The increase is probably due to an increase in spam possibly due to
> various listname-bounces addresses getting on more spammers lists.
>
Here is a sample of one semi-regular bounce I get from a list I manage
(I haved X'ed out the personal information included in the bounce). I
suspect that one issue is that this is a bounce message, not a server
refusing (thus they are probably back-scattering), and the bounce
doesn't give the address that the message was sent to (though it is in
the Delivered-To: header of the message that bounced that I trimmed).

Also, being a 'I think your a spammer' as opposed to 'That address isn't
valid' message says I am not sure one really wants to count it as a bounce.

(pair.com/pairlist.net is my service provider, arlingtonlist.org is the
domain for the mailing list, osiris.978.org is their domain)


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Date: 2 Jul 2019 08:30:09 -0400
Message-ID: <20190702123009.28338.qmail at osiris.978.org>
From: MAILER-DAEMON at osiris.978.org
To: <arlington-bounces at arlingtonlist.org>
Subject: failure notice
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1670.1561691523.13590.arlington at arlingtonlist.org>
References: <mailman.1670.1561691523.13590.arlington at arlingtonlist.org>

Hi. This is the bounce program. I'm afraid I've been instructed to return
your message. It was refused by the recipient's junk mail controls.

To reach XXXXXXXXXXX, please telephone +1 888 XXXXXXX.

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

-- 
Richard Damon