Mailman and bounces...

[Alan Clegg]

While off-topic to BIND, as a point of list management, I would like to
present the following commentary:

The topic of bounces was brought up recently and I'd like to expound a
bit on some of the issues that the change in mailing list managers has
caused.

It seems that the previous mailing list software did no list "bounce
management" what-so-ever.  If an address was on the list, it was on the
list forever, even if it was disabled, removed, put behind a
spam-bouncing device, etc.

The new software does a very good job of catching "bounced" e-mail which
now includes things like:

   554 Sorry, this message appears to be spam (#5.6.0)

   550-5.7.1 rejected content, black listed

   554 Sorry, message looks like SPAM to me

   554 5.7.1 Message failed spam test: Incident ID 1xxxxxx0

   554 5.7.1 Message scored extremely high on spam scale.  No incident
             created.

ALL of the above responses were to legitimate e-mail that were NOT spam,
but did contain config files, BIND error messages, output from dig, etc.

The combination of messages with "high spamity ratings" and a list
manager that now actually cares about bounces is causing people to have
their list memberships disabled, and then their addresses removed from
the lists.

We (ISC list managers) do our best to keep the list spam-free, but many
posts are being tagged as junk by over-sensitive filtering software.

If there is anything that you, as users of the list can do to limit the
number of "this looks like spam" bounces that your mailers generate by
adding ISC to the appropriate white-lists, we would much appreciate it.

This e-mail will probably not make it to the people to-whom it is
addressed because it contains things that their filters will not allow
to pass.

Alan Clegg
bind-*/dhcp-* list manager

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