- Stephen J. Turnbull (stephenjturnbull@gmail.com) [210824 19:31]:
First of all, until recently Mailman 3 wasn't doing any bounce processing at all. Depending on your version, it's possible that Mailman had nothing to do with it.
Well, the mail adress got disabled, and the user got warning mails ("Your subscription for list mailing list has been disabled"). As none of the list owners did that, I don't think there is any other explanation. Please note that individualsation was enabled, so all mails are sent out with per-subscriber mail envelope address, which then makes bounce detection quite straight-forward.
Now, are these going to the bounce address, or to the list? If they're going to the bounce address, I doubt they're being recognized as standard delivery status notifications.
They are sent to the bounce address (more specifically list-bounces+user=domain@listdomain where user@domain is subscribed to the list).
I think they're probably still counted as bounces if sent to a LIST-bounces address, but they should also be sent to the list owner as "unrecognized bounces".
I didn't get them as list owner, so no. (I however have duplicates of the unprocessed mails, so I can check what was actually sent to the -bounce-adress). I only became aware of the fact after I got a complaint that the account had been disabled.
This decision isn't something Mailman should be doing because it depends on context and guessing what the subscriber wants. Really, this is an owner problem, not a Mailman problem.
What should I do different as owner? The user was set to disabled without any manual intervention from me as list owner.
It's not obvious what *we* should do.
My proposal would be to ignore messages sent to the bounce address with the 'Auto-Submitted: auto-replied (vacation)' header. I'm thinking about doing that change on the MTA level, but I believe it would be more appropriate at the mailman level.
If Mailman continues sending posts to the user, it can fill his or her mailbox with mail that is in many cases available in archives. Not a good idea.
I would say, that's up to the user.
In fact, typically the reason vacationers get unsubscribed is because their mailboxes fill up, and they generate real bounces.
This would be a real bounce, and of course should be handled as such.
Or a moderator got tired of vacation messages to the list, and nuked the subscription.
There was no vacation message at the list, and also no was sent to the moderators or the list address.
Are you sure one of those is not what happened here?
"Reasonably sure" I would say. Also, as written above, the user received the "Your subscription for list mailing list has been disabled" mail which specifies :
Your subscription has been disabled on the $mailinglist mailing list because it has received a number of bounces indicating that there may be a problem delivering messages to $address. You may want to check with your mail administrator for more help.
I don't understand how the user managed to get automatically unsubscribed unless you have aggressive bounce settings on the mailing list(s) or they were gone for quite a while. What should happen is after the first few bounces they will be disabled, and then checks for reactivation will be sent once a day or so.
Sorry, I meant "disabled". A contributing fact was for sure that the users mail setup sent out the vacation mail on any incoming mail, not only the first, and also on mails with precendence list. I adressed that already to the user (because I believe it's a bug), but of course, IMHO this should be adressed at both sides. (Especially as the mail provider is gmx, this is *the* largest webmail provider in Germany, so both the probability of fixes is rather low, and the probability of happening with users users is not too low.)
Thanks for your help
Andi