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We're trying to debug mass bounces from ISPs such as Yahoo! and Comcast for one of mailing lists powered by mailman. Unfortunately, I've never found a setting that allows mailman to handle the bounces, but also CC postmaster (or some other email address) with the actual bounce messages so we can see what the specific bounce error they give us.

Our /etc/aliases contains the following for each newsletter:

newslettername-bounces: "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces newslettername"

So I was just going to replace that with:

newslettername-bounces: postmaster@domain.tld

But then I realized that the /etc/aliases quotes the entry for the bounce address, uses a pipe and passes arguments to the mailman command... so, can I modify that line somehow to send it to mailman as well as pass the original message off to postmaster?

morgant
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1 Answers1

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Oops, this was an easy one and I jumped the gun on asking the question. man aliases gave the answer:

    name: addr_1, addr_2, addr_3, . . .

The name is the name to alias, and the addr_n are the aliases for  that
name.  addr_n can be another alias, a local username, a local filename,
a command, an include file, or an external address.

It's a simple comma separation! Doh! If only my own size 12 boot would reach my own ass, I'd be kicking myself really hard right now!

So, I changed the line in /etc/aliases to the following and then ran sudo newaliases:

newslettername-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces newslettername", postmaster@domain.tld

That should do it.

morgant
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