Excessive Bounces

[Rob Jarratt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jay West
> Sent: 02 July 2016 10:37
> To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: RE: Excessive Bounces
> 
> I did dig into this for Rob, as well as a smattering of others that got
disabled
> yesterday early am.
> 
> Almost 100% of the email addresses that get disabled due to excessive
> retries are Hotmail, aol, and yahoo.  Those email providers are well known
as
> "less than reliable" to many servers, often because they are major sources
of
> spam.
> 
> Of those bounces, almost 100% of them were due to DMARC/DKIM
> mechanisms. I view DMARC/DKIM as less than useless. First, they are far
> from universally implemented - so most valid email is not DMARC/DKIM
> "protected". Second a large percentage of the spam in the world *IS*
> DMARC/DKIM "protected".
> 
> What is odd to me, many of the email addresses (list members) that get
> dropped due to excessive retries are listmembers who *DO* get list traffic
> for a while before getting occasionally disabled. I would bet that what is
> happening most of the time is that their ISP maintains a flock of MX hosts
and
> at one time decided to implement DKIM/DMARC but then realized it's a bad
> idea and removed it from service but forgot to do that on one or two of
the
> flock. Thus... by happenstance once in a while your email hits that
particular
> mx host and gets toasted. The reverse is certainly possible - that they
are
> "beta testing" it on a few of their MX hosts but not wanting to do it
> everywhere.
> 
> Please, let's not go into a long thread of the merits of SPF/DKIM/DMARC...
> I'm just letting folks know what is probably responsible for most of the
> "subscription disabled..." stuff.
> 

I have no competence to judge the merits or otherwise of these mechanisms,
so I won't say anything about it. What I would say though is, if this
affects a fair number of people, could the list server be configured to be a
bit more tolerant of bounces?

Regards

Rob