The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi Teunis,

The way Sympa manages bouncing list members is described here : http://www.sympa.org/doc/html/node25.html
Basically Sympa :

1. does automatic management of bouncing users (listmasters / owners just have to tune the system)
2. has 2 types of actions : 1) warn the user 2) unsubscribe
3. these actions are based on a bounce score which algorithm is described in the documentation
4. does NOT disable  a bouncing account because if it is disabled we can't find out if it is bouncing anymore. It is a bad way to solve the problem
5. uses VERP is a smart way : if configured VERP is used for a percentage of all list members + bouncing users

Concerning your situation :

1. Things should get better after a period of time when Sympa has collected sufficient information about bouncing users and has removed some  of them
2. You can fasten this process by tuning (minimum_bouncing_count, minimum_bouncing_period,default_bounce_level1_rate and default_bounce_level2_rate in sympa.conf)
3. The situation you describe (36 hours for 3 messages) makes me think that your MTA tuning is far from perfect. But you didn't mention the # of subscribers and # of bouncing users. As an example our Sympa server delivers a message to 15K subscribers within 378 seconds.
   

Teunis Peters wrote:

On moving our list over from mailman I discovered that there was a large number of bounced or invalid email addresses.   (thousands).   Mailman hadn't been maintained in a long time and the unsubscribe commands were broken....

(yes - I inherited a mess)

They don't want me to just delete invalid mail though.   They want me to archive the addresses or in some other way mark them as invalid in case the person in question wants to reactivate or can provide a new mail address.

Currently I'm marking them as "nomail" and bumping them into another list as per my managers' requests...
... but the bounce processing seems to be continuing.   I'm trying to figure out how to tune this thing so that it doesn't remain so
overloaded it takes a day (or more) to clear.
(It's now had 3 messages in the queue for 36 hours and shows no sign of even having seen them)   (it's a newsletter list)

Is it possible to move these accounts to some place for housekeeping?
(say - a "do not email this" registry or something?)

Also - is it possible to switch processing from "delete on bounce" to "disable on bounce"?
I'm using mysql-based lists which has made a lot of this simpler... but still not "simple"