[ale] Bounce notifications

[Robert Tweedy]

Good evening everyone,

I have made some changes (which hopefully work...) to how the ALE mailing list's GNU Mailman software is configured to make it more compliant with emails from domains publishing a DMARC reject or quarantine policy. This change may have an effect on who you're replying to when you use the "Reply" function in your email client, so please double-check who an email's addressed to before sending it as it's possible it isn't what you expect.

The problem that occurred over the past few days seems to have started when someone who joined the mailing list with an "aim.com" address submitted a post; due to AOL publishing a DMARC policy of "p=reject" on their domains, once ale.org relayed the message it broke the message's SPF validation due to not changing the "From:" field of the message, thus making the message a "forgery" as far as AOL's SPF and DMARC records are concerned. Google (and a few other domains, but mostly Google) rejected delivery of the message, which resulted in bounce notifications returning to ALE and thus counting against the bounce score for all the affected addresses. This seems to have been a problem for a while as the documentation I've read so far says that Mailman has a limit on how much it increases a bounce score each day, and yesterday was when it finally increased the score of hundreds of accounts to the level where it starts blocking and possibly unsubscribing addresses from the list.

I've gone through and re-enabled mail delivery on all addresses that had been blocked due to excessive bounces, so everyone currently subscribed to the list who didn't manually disable email delivery should now start receiving messages from the list again if they haven't already.

-Robert


 ---- On Fri, 23 Jun 2017 06:24:06 -0400 Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote ---- 
 > All,
 > It seems the mailman instance for ALE is bouncing messages excessively (and filling my inbox with subscriber blocked notices - up to about 350 now).
 > Please be patient as this gets resolved. 
 > Robert, please check the logs for any obvious issues over the past 24-48 hours. Also please post a blurb about the existence of this issue on the website. Doing so by cell phone screen and keyboard is not working for me.
 > I have seen past connectivity issues for the ALE server that were intermittent and network specific that appeared as router table failures (connect fail, connection to wrong system, nonexistent IP address, etc). Nothing like the scale I currently see.