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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Conrad G T Yoder writes:

 > > 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?
 > 
 > It is a true bounce - mail is being rejected.  The error message is
 > phrased as a "temporary failure," but the message is bounced at the
 > SMTP transaction.  “At some point,” they stop bouncing.  RR won’t
 > say when that happens.

The log you display is not a true bounce.  If your host's MTA is
configured properly, you may get DSNs saying that you don't need to do
anything but wait, but your users' bounce counts are not increasing
due to messages like the one below, and they probably are eventually
being delivered (although that can't be determined from the log below).

 > <user at roadrunner.com>: delivery temporarily suspended: host
 >    cdptpa-pub-iedge-vip.email.rr.com[107.14.166.70] refused to talk to me: 421
 >    4.7.1 - Connection refused - <66.33.216.56> -  Too many concurrent
 >    connections ( <2> ) from source IP

This is absolutely clearly with no doubt whatsoever a problem that
only can be resolved by reconfiguring the MTA at one end or the other.
I gather that your MTA is a DreamHost responsibility, so they are
either amazingly incompetent or lying to you.  I don't blame them for
not wanting to deal with it, by the way, only for trying to blame the
victims (you and your Roadrunner subscribers).  Roadrunner's policy is
brain-damaged, DreamHost's is merely pragmatic (it's very costly to
try to work around a peer site's brain damage).

The only effective measures you can take that I can see based on what
you have written so far are (1) find a competent and responsive host
for your list (there may not be any, though; I'm not sure what to do
to get reliable timely delivery to a system like Roadrunner), or
(2) tell your Roadrunner subscribers that their host is incapable of
supporting reliable mail delivery and that you can't do anything; if
they care about reliable delivery of mailing lists including yours,
they should use an address at a competent provider (GMail is the only
competent and approximately socially responsible freemail provider I
know of).

 > > This may be partly true, if you are falling afoul of the "too many
 > > recipients per message" limit.
 > 
 > I will probably turn that on soon - it is available to me.

This probably won't help, because based on the message above your MTA
will helpfully just execute the deliveries in parallel, and you'll get
*more* delivery failures, not less.

 > On this instance, they haven’t been very helpful.  For the most
 > part, though, they have been decent.  The largest of my lists that
 > I admin has over 7600 subscribers, with about 15 emails going out
 > daily - that’s about 115K total emails a day, and for the price I
 > am paying DH, I haven’t found anywhere near a better deal.  So I
 > accept these (occasional) issues along with the deal I’m getting.

This issue doesn't look "occasional" to me.  However, if what is most
likely a permanent inability to achieve timely delivery to subscribers
at Roadrunner is acceptable to you, I don't have any complaints. :-/

Steve