[UCIMC-Tech] Mailman mass unsubscribe

[Jay Schubert]

I also encountered this on and UIUC.edu address.  It wasn't until I
manually whitelisted chambana in the users CITES control panel for them
that they received any mails from us.  They had never changed their email
spam filtering level so were rolling completely with default settings.  Any
way to tell how widespread this problem could be?  Any simple way around it
(rename the server?).

Thanks,
Jay

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 12:38 AM, Stuart Levy <salevy at illinois.edu> wrote:

>  This sounds familiar -- I'm seeing such spontaneous un-subscriptions on
> lists that I monitor as well, though not so many.
>
> There is some problem (which fortunately Josh understands) where the IMC
> mail server being blacklisted, by *some* mail receivers, due to its network
> being used in the past by spam-senders.
>
> This apparently causes some recipients (e.g. att.net/sbcglobal.net) to
> systematically reject mail coming from the IMC.  After some number of
> rejections (configurable in the Bounce Processing mailman page), mailman
> disables the account, and you as the admin get notified.     But most of
> the bounces are handled in the bowels of mailman where AFAIK we can't see
> them.  It's hard to know just how frequent they are, or which users they
> are happening with, without scanning the mail logs.
>
> In other words, it's hard to know just how much mail people should be
> getting but aren't.   I suspect that people on gmail are getting everything
> (google ignores this blacklist).  It could be that those on
> att.net/sbcglobal.net and possibly other ISPs are losing many or even all
> messages from IMC lists -- I hope that isn't the case but fear that it may
> be.
>
>
> On 4/22/12 10:48 PM, Josh King wrote:
>
> Hey Jay,
>
> Unfortunately I'm still working on getting new logging/monitoring stuff
> set up, and didn't finish this weekend. I'll be working on that during
> my free time throughout the week, for as long as that takes. However, I
> did track down most of the addresses you provided to me. They look like
> legitimate bounce processing, with most of them being eitherillinois.edu addresses for people who left the University, or gmail
> accounts where gmail claims that they are no longer valid users. So my
> current working theory is that the unsubscriptions are legitimate
> Mailman bounce processing, which possibly wasn't being processed
> correctly before the list functionality was temporarily migrated to a
> new server. It should be possible to turn off bounce processing on your
> list if that is not a desired feature; I can provide instructions.
> Otherwise, if there are addresses in the list that are being
> unsubscribed that you know are legitimate, I can investigate further in
> case U of I, Gmail or others are providing illegit responses (which
> wouldn't be entirely outside the realm of possibility in the arcane
> world of email processing).
>
> On 04/20/2012 09:52 AM, Josh King wrote:
>
>  Hi Jay,
>
> I've been meaning to clean up the logging. There's now a central log server for all system logs, but it currently isn't very well organized. If you can forward me the list of addresses off-list, I can track that down for you this afternoon, and I'll clean up the logging server and send out access information for it this weekend. Sound good?
>
> Jay Schubert <jay.schubert at gmail.com> <jay.schubert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>  Tech,
>
> Anyone have any advice about what I can check in Mailman to understand
> what's happening when I get notification that 29 or 16 people at a time
> have been unsubscribed from our general mail list (bookstoprisoners)?
> The
> only info the email I receive has is "[address] has been unsubscribed"
> (over and over for different addresses x 30 lines) and I've recently
> gotten
> a few of them at a surprising rate (I'm used to seeing a few here and
> there
> but to see them come in such large batches is alarming).
>
> Are there logs that give more info about the reason / action that
> triggered
> the unsubscribes?
>
> Thanks,
> Jay
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