... because they are bouncing.

In my ongoing attempt to investigate and fix problems of our mailinglist-server, i found that we only had a working bounce-detection for lists starting debian-* minus debian-private and the three digest-lists.

So i rewrote some parts of the bounce detection:

We now have four categories of lists:

• high (30 or more mails a day)
• medium (20 or more mails a week)
• low (10 or more mails a month)
• very-low (the rest)

for these four categories we calculate a spam-rate depending on the number of distributed messages and the number of bounces in the timerange of 24 hours for 'high' lists, 7 days for 'medium' lists, 30 days for 'low' lists and 90 days for 'very-low' lists.

If the Spamrate exceeds 80% for unmoderated, and 60% for moderated lists, and bounces have been seen for more than 24 hours we kick. (these rates are subject to change, when we have implemented the warning mechanism)

So these changes implemented a bounce-detection for debian-changes-digest and today we reached the level of 60% bounces for more than 500 subscribers.

So what next?

To finish the bounce-detection, i want to implement something which tries to notify subscribers about bouncing mails. This is useless for 'hard'-bouncers, but people with some smaller problems like mail2news-gatewayers this could be helpful. I also want to implement something which sends out unsubscription notices for three weeks after the kick, so kicked out people can resubscribe after they have sorted out the problems.

Both should fire once a week per address.

What do you think?

While analysing the pole setters in our internal bouncers-Hitlist i found that some of them run a mail2news-Gateway.

The problem is: our Mailinglists leave Mail-Headers mostly untouched, and so headers like X-Trace or X-Complaints-To are passed through without modifications.

If a mail containing those headers is handed over to inews (as in INN) it rejects it, and the bounce comes back to us:

<XXXXX@XXX.com>: Command died with status 1: "/usr/bin/maildrop". Command
output: inews: cannot send article to server: 441 Can't set system
"X-Complaints-To" header inews: article not posted

so people: fix your systems. if you do more with listmail than dropping it somewhere make sure that the bounces your system produces go to someone who can fix it. We (as in listmasters) normally simply unsubscribe those.

btw: we talk about 18181 bounces since 08.2004 in this case.

ich schreib ja schon hier das ich an dem Entwicklerprogramm von Nokia für das n810 teilnehme.

Heute vormittag habe ich nun das Gerät als letzter der Kollegen erhalten.

Das Gerät selber ist interessant, und durchaus beeindruckend, diverse Härtetests wie Geocaching, Routing, oder externes Hirn stehen aber noch aus. Derzeit bin ich noch damit beschäftigt mich wohnlich einzurichten, VPNs zu basteln, und so weiter. Dazu später in anderen Blogeinträgen mehr.

Aber noch ein paar Takte zum Ablauf des Programms:

im November haben wir die Codes bekommen, danach gab es immer mal wieder Hinweise darauf wann diese Codes möglicherweise funktionsfähig werden könnten. Letztendlich sind einige Daten ins Land gegangen und am Montag abend (vermutlich weil sich jemand mal an den offiziellen Nokia-Kundenabwehrportalen vorbei, social hacking in der deutschen Organisation betrieben hat) liefen die Codes dann.

Überraschenderweise war der Discount dann für einen Full-Discount gut, also muss man laut Nokia-Shop nur den Versand bezahlen. Der Lieferschein dagegen weist zwar den Rabatt von 459Euro aus, summiert dann aber trotzdem auf 464Euro. wieviel am Ende abgebucht wird, wird man sehen müssen. Die Geschichte ist also möglicherweise noch nicht zu Ende.

Es sieht also so aus, als würde es bei Nokia drunter und drüber gehen, das ganze Entwicklerprogramm lief bisher jedenfalls nicht rund.

Zu guter Letzt hat der von Nokia beauftragte Paketdienst GLS das Paket ohne irgendeine Benachrichtigung bei einem Nachbarn abgeworfen. Das ist hier zwar so Usus, auch wir nehmen öfter mal Lieferungen für die Nachbarn an, aber das so etwas ohne werfen einer Postkarte ala 'Ware bei Nr. 22 abgegeben' gemacht wird, halte ich für ein Unding.

Nun, morgen gibts ne nette Tour übers Land, dann schauen wir mal was das kommerzielle 7Tage-lizensierte Maps so bringt und der maemo-mapper.

Just a quick note:

while wading through the list-archives, drop-boxes and list-configuration to find false positives and possiblities to optimise our mailinglists spam level i accidently removed the inclusion of our spamfilters from most lists.

I appologise for this.

Luckily zobel discovered my error and fixed it at 14:30 CET.

I'm just wadeing through Debian-Mailinglists on the search for enhancements and false-positives.

and i just came over debian-security-announce, a lists that sends a helpful message back to submitters that aren't allowed to send out advisories.

That message didn't contain a Precedence-Header so i added one, and wondered which value would be appropriate... I remember to have seen three values: 'junk', 'bulk' and 'list' (the latter should be set for all our Mailinglists).

So i tried the usual ways to find out about some more possible values, but i couldn't find a RfC or another Document that describes correct usage of the Precedence-Header.

So, i set the Header to 'junk' now, but if someone could point me to some documentation i would be thankful.

Update: formorer pointed me to RFC 3834 - Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail which contains all of the things i needed to know. Thank you.