Does anybody else gateway messages from NNTP, and specifically Usenet using Mailman 2.1.x?
We've been seeing a very weird behavior where python-list (which is gated to and from comp.lang.python) suddenly mass bounce disables every regular delivery member. The triggering bounce messages always come from NNTP, never from email. The problem doesn't appear to affect digest members. There are other clues <wink>. Here's what I believe happens: Mailman pulls a message pulled from NNTP, and tries to post it to the list. The message however triggers and Exim acl check such as the one on message header syntax or one of our homegrown virus checks. Exim then rejects the message at SMTP hand-off time. Mailman see that rejection and scores a bounce message for every SMTP recipient. Now, I VERP that list so everybody gets a separate SMTP session, but I see about the number of rejects as the number of non-already-disabled regular delivery members. Exim never rejects a digest containing one of the trigger messages. Any message posted via mail that would hit one of our Exim acls would never even make it to the list, but NNTP pulled messages bypass that front-door check. I think part of the problem is our Exim config, and I'm working with the other python.org postmasters to address that. The other problem is in Mailman's handling of rejections at SMTP time. Currently, it always scores a bounce for any recipients of such a rejected message, and this scoring bypasses the bounce_processing flag. I think this behavior is at least partially broken. One fix would be to never score a bounce if the message was rejected at SMTP time. We could move the message to qfiles/bad and log the rejection but otherwise ignore the scoring. This might be bad because then Mailman wouldn't score bounces for non-existent local users, and because on a VERP'd list, we might get tons of qfiles/bad messages for every gated message. This latter might be manageable. We could just ignore rejections only for messages pulled from NNTP, which should reduce the missing of legitimate scoring for bogus local users, since they'll still get scored for regular email posts. Anybody have any thoughts or comments? I'm probably going to implement the latter to fix the immediate problem. -Barry _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
