Bounces have been driving me crazy of late - mostly broken sendmail sites,
or broken pathalias routes.  And I don't really have time to do thorough
investigation of these anymore.  I am now instituting a new bounce policy:
 
    1) If I get two bounces back from a given address, the address will
       be deleted.
    2) I will usually take the effort to actually read the bounce message,
       and if it suggests anything that I can do to fix the addressing of
       the subscriber I will try it.  I will not email postmasters or
       other similar things.
    3) If the first bounce indicates "user unknown", it will be deleted
       immediately.
    4) "unknown site" from domain authorities (ie: "foo.edu" says "bar.foo.edu"
       doesn't exist) are immediate deletions.
    5) Two successive "quota exceeded" and you're out (if you're likely to
       be away long enough for this to occur, please email me, and I'll
       temporarily delete you)
    6) kodak.com and anything that routes through it is subject to
       long outages.  Any non-kodak person noting FML routing thru kodak,
       is best advised to email me with a better route.  Any Kodak
       employee is advised to keep your fingers crossed - your postmasters
       should be taken out and shot - in all the years I've been "doing"
       email (and writing email software and FAQs) I have never
       EVER seen a supposedly major system so badly run.  Say a prayer
       for Robin who's had her email broken over a dozen times...
 
Use of ".forward" to handle moving from one machine to another is frowned
upon, unless temporary or within the same domain.  Ie: "foo.bar.com" ->
"foop.bar.com".  The reason for this is that it's very seldom that I
can figure out which subscriber the bounce is for because the original
address has been lost.  Sendmail sites are REALLY good at losing any
and all useful diagnostic information.
 
We average an article every day or three.  If you don't get an FML
issue for a week (where I've not warned that I'll be away), I may have
deleted you.  Send me email and I'll be happy to resubscribe you.
Especially if you can provide me with a better address.
 
As you'll notice, we seem to be wobbling around 160-170 subscribers.
Which is fine.  However, given the age of the FML, plus the fact that
bounces are unreliable (some people estimate that as high as 60% of
sites can't properly bounce), there's likely to be a large number
of bogus addresses in the list.
 
When I get around to it, I will probably be asking every subscriber
to send me a piece of mail to a special email address to indicate
that they're still there.  Addresses not responding will be deleted.
Don't worry, I'll give plenty of warning, and give a month or more
before actually deleting anyone.  Anyone not able to get thru to
me will be able to email to other people, or phone me to leave
their ack.  I will also try with individual mail to wrangle up the
laggards ;-)
 
But I'm NOT doing this yet!
 
[Posted in FML issue 0407]