[geeks] ADMINISTRIVIA: Changes to mail delivery policies

[Bill Bradford]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 02:12:39AM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> I just want to point out that your choice of 24 hours is very bogus on
> at least two fronts, and also tell you I'm not the only one saying so.

You've made some good points here, all of which I was already aware of.

Basically, once I divest myself of the 4300-member Sun-Managers list later
this summer, I'll set things back to normal, since I'll only be hosting the
SunHELP lists.

Until then, I have to spend at least 45 minutes a day dealing with
HUNDREDS of "Delivery Status Notification", etc, emails generated by
subscribers of that list and broken mail hosts.

Imagine this:

- Person subscribes to list, with address hosted on Exchange server, or with
  address with Exchange server as primary MX.
- Person's email breaks somehow.
- Primary MX host (Exchange, remember?) sends "Delivery Status Notification"
  every few hours about the email its trying to deliver, *if* my end was able to
  even hand off the mail to the MX at all.
- Say, minimum of four DSNs a day.  Per email that my end sends, and the 
  list puts out, oh, 10-20 emails a day.
- Multiply by four days.

At the end of four days, I either get a torrent of "Undeliverable" messages
from the Exchange MX machine, or a slightly smaller number of undeliverable
messages from *my* MTA.  If I've not spotted this early on, and unsubscribed
the person so that the flow of messages to that destination is stopped, this
ends up with 200-300 (on average) emails that I have to deal with, from JUST
ONE DESTINATION ADDRESS.  Multiply by 10-15.  Thats what I have to deal with.

Also, this is all non-critical mailing list traffic.  If someone has MX 
problems and gets unsubscribed, they can resubscribe when things are fixed,
and catch up by reading the archives.

The changes I've made have already made a difference in the time I have to 
spend dealing with that particular list every day.  

If it was just the SunHELP lists, it would be different - but *JUST* the
Sun-Managers list generates, on average, about FORTY-TWO THOUSAND outgoing
emails a *DAY*.  (4200 subscribers x 10 emails day).

(some subscriber count comparisons:
	sunmanagers: 4294
	sunhelp: 1019 
	rescue: 421
	geeks: 192 )

I'm looking forward to the final release of MailMan 2.1, since it deals with
bounces much better than the current 2.0.8.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX