[Toybox] gmail unsubscribed everyone from the list again.

[Rob Landley]

On 2/9/19 5:28 PM, Robert Thompson wrote:
> For what it's worth,
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-admin/node25.html
> 
> It's been several years since I had to deal with this kind of thing,

Eh, the reason I'm bothering to post about it here is that one of these times it
unsubscribes everybody, I'll just move _my_ email to dreamhost's email servers
and let the 88 people it keeps batch-unsubscribing re-subscribe if they want to,
and if not... *shrug*. At this point gmail's false positives on spam filtering
are bad enough it's probably a wash at this point.

But this weekend, and last weekend, I manually re-subscribed everybody via the
web interface. One checkbox at a time, one letter at a time. (The awkwardness of
fixing it is dreamhost's fault: gmail is triggering badness in dreamhost, and
vice versa.)

I'm just... getting tired of doing that on a regular basis.

> but the behavior we're seeing is similar to a case I had to
> troubleshoot in the past where the bounce-processing was configured to
> be too aggressive. This caused subtle trouble when some sites started
> implementing greylisting and rate-limited acceptance. I believe that
> gmail does both nowadays...

Unfortunately I have no control of dreamhost's mailing list processing. They're
cheap, and don't cap bandwidth or storage, but they do cap cpu usage in each
container (kill signal to the highest CPU user if the running average goes over
80% in a 5 second period, or something like that?) so I can't run my own
services for this sort of thing.

Dreamhost tries to redeliver the same message when delivery fails, and gmail
refuses delivery with a "server refused" error message which is interpreted as a
delivery failure, and after enough retries the person is unsubscribed. This
would be less of a problem if gmail didn't regularly false positive on _random_
things. This recent bounce was it false positiving on this message from me:

  http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2019-February/010142.html

About half the bounces unsubscribing everybody seem to be on messages from me.
It's done it on messages from Elliott too, which is officially ironic. And every
time it does, it unsubscribes all the gmail users.

And it will never be fixed because there are no humans reachable on the gmail
side. If there were I would have asked them to fix the filtering that prevents
copies of my own messages ever being sent back to me, or both copies of messages
when I'm cc'd (removing either breaks mailing list threading), which is a
_decade_ old bug lots of people have complained about over the years. Here's my
own 2012 gripe about that:

  https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012

But gmail doesn't listen, has never listened, and is not going to _start_
listening. *shrug* So we cope. And at this point most lists seem to have lumped
"using gmail" in with "using outlook" as pilot error anyway:

  https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA

*shrug* Just a heads up that one of these times, I won't resubscribe the gmail
users...

Rob