[Mailman-Users] Uncaught Bounce Notification

You send them to me, but I need the full raw message, not just the
body, because various things in the headers are used to determine
which heuristics to apply to the message.


Whether or not the address is a list member has nothing to do with
recognition. If the bounce is sent to you as unrecognized, Mailman
doesn't know what address bounced. Mailman is saying it couldn't
determine the address. If Mailman had determined the address, and it
wasn't a list member, it would have just ignored the bounce


This has a Qmail flavor to it, but it doesn't comply with
<http://cr.yp.to/proto/qsbmf.txt>.

Though it would be nice for Mailman to recognize this bounce format and
automatically process it, I am questioning if this particular bounce
should be acted upon or not.

Seeing as how this bounce was generated because the recipient was over
quota "User's Disk Quota Exceeded", I wonder what the appropriate thing
to do is. This is (IMHO) *very* likely to be a transient / temporary
error. As such I'm not sure that I would want to act on this particular
error. However if a bunch of these errors happened, then I might want
to take action.

So I'm not sure if this is where the number of bounces (before something
is done) comes in to play, or what. Just something to think about.



Grant. . . .

Don't temporary failures get a score of 0.5 while a permanent failure gets
a score of 1.0? So, if that is the case, these temporary failures would
take longer to suspend the account. I think these should be counted.

Jeff

That's what the documentation says, but in fact, it doesn't work that
way. Bounces which are recognized as 'warnings', e.g. "Unable to
deliver your message for 4 hours, will keep trying ...", are ignored.
All other recognized bounces are given a weight of 1.0.

Oh, thanks for that information.

That question hinges on whether or not the bounce should be considered
a permanent or a temporary failure. The bounce itself says "This is a
permanent error."


I disagree. I think it is likely to be an abandoned account, but in any
case, with default bounce processing settings, The user's delivery
won't be disabled until a bounce like this is received on 5 separate
days.


Exactly.

Also note that the message also said "Your message totalled 23 Kbytes.
However a small (< 1Kb) message will be delivered should
you wish to inform your recipient you tried to email."

So probably when we disable the user's delivery after 5 days of
bounces, the disabled notice we send to the user might be accepted,
and with default settings, the user won't be unsubscribed until 3
weeks and two more notices later.

Granted, this could be a user on an extended vacation (over a month),
but in that case, ultimately unsubscribing the user is easy to reverse
and is small penalty for the user's forgetting to disable list
delivery.

*****
Grant Taylor wrote:

That question hinges on whether or not the bounce should be considered
a permanent or a temporary failure. The bounce itself says "This is a
permanent error."


I disagree. I think it is likely to be an abandoned account, but in any
case, with default bounce processing settings, The user's delivery
won't be disabled until a bounce like this is received on 5 separate
days.


Exactly.

Also note that the message also said "Your message totalled 23 Kbytes.
However a small (< 1Kb) message will be delivered should
you wish to inform your recipient you tried to email."

So probably when we disable the user's delivery after 5 days of
bounces, the disabled notice we send to the user might be accepted,
and with default settings, the user won't be unsubscribed until 3
weeks and two more notices later.

Granted, this could be a user on an extended vacation (over a month),
but in that case, ultimately unsubscribing the user is easy to reverse
and is small penalty for the user's forgetting to disable list
delivery.

Agreed. However I believe the permanent or temporary nature that the
bounce is speaking of is on the SMTP level, thus the sending server
should not try to send this given message again. I think it is a flaw
to extend this SMTP meaning up to actual future (different) message
delivery.
Possibly. My experience with my customer shows that people are likely
to hit their quota over a weekend or a vacation. When they come back
the following week (or when ever) and POP all their messages out of
their box, the /temporary/ error is corrected. Granted my experience
may be limited to my customer scope and more than likely does not apply
to someone like GMail or HotMail or Yahoo. I guess it depends on the
customer base.
Agreed... as long as there is not < 23 kB worth of email received in the
next 3 weeks. However if the user does not clean out their mail box in
that time this leads credence to the likely hood that the account is
abandoned.
True...



Grant. . . .


P.S. I find it interesting that the bounce is eluding to the amount of
space remaining in the account. This is (in my experience) extremely
unusual.

As I read the bounce, it says

Sorry, your intended recipient has too much mail stored
in his mailbox.
Your message totalled 23 Kbytes.
However a small (< 1Kb) message will be delivered should
you wish to inform your recipient you tried to email.

and I interpret that to mean that even though the user is over quota,
the MTA will accept a < 1 KB message to allow you to try to notify the
user of the problem, not that the user is 1 KB below quota.

*nod*

Hopefully there is a limit to how far over quota the mail box can be
before the server stops accepting small messages, or it would still be
possible to DoS the system.



Grant. . . .

This is an excellent point. I don't think I could have said it better
myself.