[NLRS] Recent unsubscribes of arrl.net email addresses

[Bruce Richardson]

Hello NLRS reflector members:

As your list administrator, I've seen some recent (last two weeks)
unsubscribes from the list. They came in ones and two's so I assumed it
was guys doing it of their own initiative.  But I must tell you that the
reflector software has some automatic "unsubscribe" features to manage
old addresses that don't seem to be valid anymore.

Over the years, ARRL has offered a nice benefit of the arrl.net for those
members who chose to use it. But also over the years there have been
hiccups when their servers stopped passing mail well. Every hiccup HAS
eventually been cleared.

Please know that if your arrl.net address was recently unsubbed from the
reflector, it was not my direct action, but rather, the automatic
features of the reflector software.  And if you've recently been unsubbed
you aren't seeing this email :-) .  Yes, one option is for me is to resub
every unsubscribe from arrl.net over the past few weeks.  But based on
the information I paste below, you can see why I have not.  If any of you
think I should, just let me know and we can discuss it.

I'm not badmouthing arrl.net. I think it's a great idea and serves a
valid function. But there were some recent hiccups where they had trouble
passing mail over a 5-10 day period.  That led to a bunch of bounces
which the reflector software turned into unsubs.

I stand here ready to assist any of your NLRS reflector issues. I can
help you configure multiple addresses so that you can post from multiple
addresses but only receive messages at one or whatever. Or I can change
you over to "digest mode" if the traffic is a bit much.

73
Bruce W9FZ
NLRS list administrator

Copied text from Tim, Al Waller's righthandman:

Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:11:34 -0400
From: Tim <listowner at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: Re: [Mailman Admins] ARRL problem?

The auto removal of bouncing addresses is a feature in mailman.  It is
described in the manual which can be found by using the link at the
bottom of all postings to this list.

It works like this:

The server tries for 24 hours to send a message before it is returned to
the list that sent it.  By default the number of DAYS (not postings) of
bouncing mail is set to 5.  We also set the period that the 5 days of
bounces can occur to 30.  The last setting is how many warnings is sent
(3) and how often (1 per week).  

So, if a member of a list has 5 days of bouncing mail in a 30 day period,
mail to him is put on hold.  He will be sent the warning message every
week for 3 weeks before he is unsubscribed.  If he responds to the
warning message before it expires his subscription will be reinstated
immediately.  If he doesn't respond, he can re-subscribe himself which
may be inconvenient but isn't the end of the world.

Using the default settings a member can have about a month of bouncing
mail before he is actually removed from the list.  Note that this is more
than adequate time to have transient problems resolved.  

Note that Al and I both feel that these settings should not be increased
to keep bouncing addresses on your lists since this only increases the
load on the mailman server trying to send mail over and over to bouncing
addresses.  This is especially true for high volume lists since 20 posts
a day to 3 or 4 bouncing addresses can quickly fill our mail queue with
mail for bad addresses, and make retries go sky high.

This deal with ARRL server is unfortunate and it's too bad if these folks
can't understand that them being removed is either their fault for not
responding to the warning message (regardless if their spam filter caught
it or not) or the fault of the spammers that overloaded the ARRL servers
and cause them to be unreachable.  It is not the fault of the list admins
or the mailman server.  

(...w9fz snip out of comment...)

Hopefully this has addressed the question at hand.

Tim