On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 1:57:01PM -0600, Don Doumakes wrote:
Clearly, though, A is somehow returning an error return to the MTA...
No, B is returning the error; see below.
The bounce message from the AOL mailer daemon to the list-request address (addresses munged) says:
From MAILER-DAEMON@mymachine.mydomain.net Fri Jan 3 07:58:09 2003 Return-Path: <MAILER-DAEMON@mymachine.mydomain.net> Received: from omr-d03.mx.aol.com (omr-d03.mx.aol.com [205.188.159.1]) by mymachine.mydomain.net (8.11.6/8.11.2) with ESMTP id h03Dw4602881 for <mylist-request@mydomain.net>; Fri, 3 Jan 2003 07:58:04 -0600 Received: from air-xi03.mail.aol.com (air-xi03.mail.aol.com [172.20.116.3]) by omr-d03.mx.aol.com (v86_r1.15) with ESMTP id RELAYIN10-0103085745; Fri, 03 Jan 2003 08:57:45 -0500 from: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@aol.com> [sic] Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 08:55:58 EST To: <mylist-request@mydomain.net> Subject: Mail Delivery Problem Mailer: AIRmail [v90.10] Message-ID: <200301030857.10IdEFUa06586@omr-d03.mx.aol.com>
Your mail to the following recipients could not be delivered because they are not accepting mail from A@aol.com: B
That's a standard AOL reject-all-mail-from-blahblahblah notice. It looks like ones I see all the time to my list server. The final line of the body indicates the (aol) recipient that's rejecting the mail.
Mr. A is an AOL subscriber.
Yes, as it happens. But so is Mr. B, and it's B that's generating the bounce. B (@aol.com) is "not accepting mail from A@aol.com".
I don't have an informed opinion on whether this is a malformed bounce. (Do you?)
Well, it's kind of nasty in that the offending party, B@aol.com, is not listed as an RFC822 address, but simply as "B" and the recipient is supposed to devine the @aol.com part from context. So, you might say it's "malformed" but it's the way AOL has chosen to do it. At least the header is formed correctly, assuming that "from: " line was really a "From: " line. :)
In any case, B was eventually told:
Your mail address B has been removed from the mylist@mydomain.net mailinglist. It generated an excessive amount of bounced mails.
Then SmartList did the right thing. Bravo! You're probably using a much more recent version of SL than I am; my ISP is still on procmail3.10 and its SL version (I forget which). I seem to recall that these things get delivered straight to me as maintainer unprocessed, and I get to remove B myself.
The suggestion at a social solution is well taken, and I have indeed replaced A with B.
Still, I'm guessing that as an AOL subscriber, A lacks the kind of tools that would make it possible to bounce more politely. Sooner or later this problem will be back, with a different cast of characters, and it would be nice to solve it technically.
I'm totally confused by the statement "I have indeed replaced A with B". Nevertheless, it sounds as though your version of SmartList is handling these lame bounces correctly. Your job as maintainer should be to explain to B, if/when he requests renewal of his subscription, that he risks losing his subscription to your list repeatedly if he insists on using AOL's brain-dead reject system, and maybe he'd like to complain to the caring folks at AOL to smarten up their mailer so that it doesn't send refusal notices to mailing list admin addresses, but rather to the parties being rejected. On the other hand, sending delivery status notices to From: addrs is generally not a good idea either. Maybe just reject them silently. Jim