Thanks to Dan and Stephen for the help with mailman bounces. I understand the overall issues much better as a result and am working with my ISP to try to track down the MTA problem.
I'm still puzzled in some details in how to configure bounce processing. If there's a doc somewhere that explains it better please let me know. On the website it says the docs are incomplete and outdated. Dumb question, but I want to make sure I understand: if I turn off bounce processing what happens when there's a bounce? My current settings, I have "The maximum member bounce score before the member's subscription is disabled" set to 5.0, "The number of days after which a member's bounce information is discarded, if no new bounces have been received in the interim" at 7, "How many Your Membership Is Disabled warnings a disabled member should get before their address is removed from the mailing list" at 3, and "The number of days between sending the Your Membership Is Disabled warnings" at 7. I have the three bounce-notifications-to-me settings turned on. I interpret these setting to mean that it will be at least 5 days before a subscriber email address could be disabled and 3 more days until automatic removal. However, I've had a subscriber report that after rejoining my list he was unsubscribed again the very next day due to bouncing. Is that possible? The mailman description for bounce processing (enclosed below) says, "You can control both the number of reminders the member will receive and the frequency with which these reminders are sent." It isn't clear to me how to control that from the settings offered. At what point do warning messages get sent and how often do subscribers receive bounce messages? How do I change the frequency and text of bounce warning messages? My subscribers complain that they don't like to receive bounce messages. Can I stop their bounce warning messages but still keep getting bounce notifications sent to me? How? It says, "You should tune both of these to the frequency and traffic volume of your list." For a one-way list of 500 subscribers who get a few announcements a week, how would I estimate what the right settings should be? Thank you! Robin --------------- According to mailman: When a bounce is received, Mailman tries to extract two pieces of information from the message: the address of the member the message was intended for, and the severity of the problem causing the bounce. The severity can be either hard or soft meaning either a fatal error occurred, or a transient error occurred. When in doubt, a hard severity is used. If no member address can be extracted from the bounce, then the bounce is usually discarded. Otherwise, each member is assigned a bounce score and every time we encounter a bounce from this member we increment the score. Hard bounces increment by 1 while soft bounces increment by 0.5. We only increment the bounce score once per day, so even if we receive ten hard bounces from a member per day, their score will increase by only 1 for that day. When a member's bounce score is greater than the bounce score threshold, the subscription is disabled. Once disabled, the member will not receive any postings from the list until their membership is explicitly re-enabled (either by the list administrator or the user). However, they will receive occasional reminders that their membership has been disabled, and these reminders will include information about how to re-enable their membership. You can control both the number of reminders the member will receive and the frequency with which these reminders are sent. There is one other important configuration variable; after a certain period of time -- during which no bounces from the member are received -- the bounce information is considered stale and discarded. Thus by adjusting this value, and the score threshold, you can control how quickly bouncing members are disabled. You should tune both of these to the frequency and traffic volume of your list. ### ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
