[ga-abuse] Procedure for processing bounces at DNSO.ORG

[Elisabeth Porteneuve <Elisabeth.Porteneuve@cetp.ipsl.fr>]

Greetings,

Would you be kind enough to give your comments on the following
procedure for processing bounces at DNSO.ORG ?

The majordomo tools are implemented since a long time, the purpose
of this note is to give you an overview on how it works and how 
the work could be organized more formaly. Maybe some improvement 
could be added - we would be happy to implement it.

Please note that there is always a human being behind, and that
mistakes happen. We had it very recently, the NO CROSS POSTING
filter was missing one rule (ga with ga-roots). Thanks to Patrick
for spotting it.

Kind regards,
Elisabeth Porteneuve
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BOUNCES
-------

There are two kind of bounces:
  1. Local BOUNCES related to list filters (mainly NO CROSS POSTING,
     but also technical problems such as header lenghts or message size,
     and spams)
  2. Delivery-Reports from distant sites

Each Mailing list administrator receives corresponding Mailing
list bounces.

These two kind of bounces are handles following way:
     1.1 Spams are discarded.
     1.2 NO CROSS POSTING bounces are kept for record, but not posted.
     1.3 It may happen that a technical bounce is posted.
     1.4 If a bounced message is from the Names Council members
         or ICANN Directors or Staff it is usually posted.
     2.1 Delivery-Reports from distant sites are handled MANUALLY,
         and are proposed for more formal procedure below.

Please note that there is always a human being behind, and that
mistakes happen.

Delivery-Reports from distant sites.
------------------------------------
Majordomo Manual indicates clearly WHY Delivery-Reports from distant
sites CANNOT be handled in automated way, and provides some tools
(Perl scripts) for unsubscription /subscription of WRONG E-MAIL
ADDRESSES detected manually.

  Bounced messages come in so many different formats that it's hard to
  completely automate subscriptions to the "bounces" list.  (In fact, in
  some cases, the addressee of the bounced mail won't even be shown in
  the message!)  If the list owner's system can run a Perl script, the
  "bounces" script makes the job easy.  The script works differently than
  "approve".  The script doesn't read a message from a file or standard
  input.  Instead, it reads its command line arguments:

     % bounce listname user@xyz.com

  That command would unsubscribe the address user@xyz.com from the
  "listname" list and add them to the "bounces" list.  An owner who can't
  run the "bounce" script can send mail to Majordomo with two commands
  like these:

     approve passwdA unsubscribe listname user@xyz.com
     approve passwdB subscribe bounces user@xyz.com (931005 listname)

  The first command unsubscribes the user from the current list.  The
  second one subscribes the user to the "bounces" list, with a comment
  that shows the date and the name of the list they used to belong to.


Procedures for Delivery-Reports from distant sites to DNSO Listadmin:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A. The GA mailing list rules request for at least 7 days of technical
   problems before an e-mail address is removed from a mailing list.
   http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/2000.GA-ga-rules.html

B. All incoming mail to the GA listadmin are recorded in a file,
   which is once a week (Sunday) closed and ready to analyze.

   Those messages which are Delivery-Reports from distant sites
   are considered for MANUAL search for wrong addresses.

   After MANUAL scan, all wrong addresses are MANUALLY recorded
   in a weekly file, say weeklybounces.N, where N is a week number.

   The file weeklybounces.N is compared to weeklybounces.N-1,
   and all addresses which are in both files will be removed
   from ALL lists using the majordomo "bounce script", described
   in the Manual quoted above.

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