On Tue, 02 Oct 2001 12:08:51 -0700 arandall <Amanda> wrote: > Jim Kutter wrote:
>> That brings me to another question - what's an accurate method of >> counting the number of bounces? I was grepping the bounce log and >> counting the number of bounces for my newsletter. That will only >> work however if I wipe the bounce log every few days - and even >> then I won't get a very accurate count... Also - as far as stats >> go, in the smtp log, is that a fair count for how many messages >> really got sent? > Hmm. This (the bounce-counting) is one of the reasons I ended up > ripping Mailman into many component pieces and then ended up > custom-writing something completely different for the newsletters > themselves. If you find a clean and accurate way to do that using > Mailman, let me know. :-) Without using VERP its actually impossible. -- Mailman attempts to determine subscriber address by parsing the bounce. This is cheaper than VERP, but is also error prone. -- There is not a 1:1 mapping between bounce messages and sent messages. A single send message may generate multiple bounce messages from intermediate MTA's if they are unable to deliver it quickly. Further, given a history of sending mail, you may receive multiple bounce messages all from previous mailings (prior to your last) with no way to reliably distinguish them from bounces in response to your current mailing. Bounce counting under Mailman does give numbers, but they are unreliable and shouldn't be used for anything other than SWAGs. To get "real" bounce counts you'd not only have to use VERP across your subscriber base, but also VERP across your mailings so that every message you send not only has a unique return address for each subscriber, but also has a unique and trackable return address for each message sent to each subscriber. This is doable, but is not entirely trivial. Its quite outside of Mailman's base area of interest. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. [EMAIL PROTECTED] He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
