fedora-infrastructure

#12618 mailman unsubscribing people multiple times
Closed: Fixed with Explanation by kevin. Opened by smooge.

Closed: Fixed with Explanation
Reopen Issue

I got this angry email today about the current mailman3 bouncing old emails and unsubscribing people. I am guessing that this is linked to " mailman is sometimes hitting out of memory and needs to be restarted." in the new bringup but I am not sure so wanted to open this in case there is a large queue needing to be flushed from the postgres table versus 'letting it work its way through things'

Email address removed at this time.
Attachments
2 Jul 2025, 15:56 (15 hours ago)
to epel-devel-owner

epel-devel-bounces@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:

Your subscription has been disabled on the epel-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org mailing list
because it has received a number of bounces indicating that there may
be a problem delivering messages to bjorn@xn--rombobjrn-67a.se. You may want to
check with your mail administrator for more help.

If you have any questions or problems, you can contact the mailing
list owner at

epel-devel-owner@lists.fedoraproject.org

That's the third copy of that email I have received. Yes I know I've
been booted off that list. You can stop telling me that now.

Somebody started sending invalid junk to the list, and Mailman is too
stupid to understand the difference between invalid junk from the
sender and a delivery problem on the destination server. Instead of
telling the sender that they're violating standards, Mailman punishes
those who try to uphold standards.

So I can't subscribe to epel-devel anymore. Okay, whatever, that list
wasn't that important to me anyway. But this nagging is getting
obnoxious. It doesn't even tell me what I'm supposed to do to make the
nagging stop. Shall I start bouncing emails from epel-devel-bounces,
thus creating the delivery problem that Mailman thinks exists, to get
Mailman to stop nagging me about a nonexistent delivery problem?

Bjö

The three copies were sent on:

  1. 2025-06-08
  2. 2025-06-15
  3. 2025-06-30 (arrived 2025-07-02)

So if the out-of-memory problem began with the datacenter move, then that doesn't seem to be the cause.

After I sent the above, I got a different email that said I've been "unsubscribed" instead of "disabled". Maybe that means the nagging has stopped now, or maybe not. I guess time will tell.

Of course the root cause should still be fixed: Since Mailman assumes that a bounce can never be caused by an invalid email, Postfix should be configured with "strict_8bitmime_body = yes" and "strict_mime_encoding_domain = yes" to keep invalid messages out of the mailing lists. Anyone who sends invalid messages will then discover the bug and fix it. They can't fix bugs they're unaware of.

Metadata Update from @zlopez:
- Issue priority set to: Waiting on Assignee (was: Needs Review)
- Issue tagged with: Needs investigation, lists, medium-gain, ops

mailman processes bounces from users and after N of them it sets them to 'disabled'... so they are still subscribed by emails are not being sent to them.
Then after a month if they haven't changed back to normal subscription, it 'unsubscribes' them.

Have you gotten any more of these?

It's difficult to search logs due to the unicode in your domain. I fear mailman3 doesn't handle that too well... or at least it logs it strangely.

Kevin Fenzi wrote:

mailman processes bounces from users and after N of them it sets them
to 'disabled'... so they are still subscribed by emails are not being
sent to them.=20
Then after a month if they haven't changed back to normal subscription,
it 'unsubscribes' them.=20

I wonder what the scenario might have been where that seemed to make
sense.

To make it a whole month I have to start counting from the "probe".
There was an "epel-devel mailing list probe message" on the 1st of
June, but those updates-testing reports that were correctly encoded
continued to arrive until the 8th when the first email that said
"disabled" was sent. From then it was 24 days to the one that said
"unsubscribed".

The probe message said "You don't need to do anything to remain an
enabled member of the mailing list.", and I thought Mailman would
conclude that delivery to my address worked when the probe didn't
bounce. Why else would it be called a probe? But now it seems like the
"probe" marked the start of the one-month timer.

Have you gotten any more of these?

Since the "unsubscribed" message there haven't been any more so far.

It's difficult to search logs due to the unicode in your domain. I
fear mailman3 doesn't handle that too well... or at least it logs it
strangely.

I haven't seen what it looks like in the log of course, but Mailman
would be far from the only piece of software that still hasn't
understood that more than 26 letters exist.

Metadata Update from @kevin:
- Issue assigned to kevin

Anyhow, I do not see this happening anymore, and I am not sure what caused it. ;(

Please feel free to reopen if you see it happening again.

Metadata Update from @kevin:
- Issue close_status updated to: Fixed with Explanation
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
Metadata

Needs investigation lists medium-gain ops

None
None
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