[Fot] Fw: Fot mailing list probe message

[Mark J Bradakis]

These probe messages are legitimate. Basically it is the mailman list manager trying to make my life a little
easier. Those of you who use addresses affiliated in some manner with yahoo, aol, hotmail and comcast are most
likely to get them.  You can thank DMARC for that ( technical, no need to worry about not understanding. )

If you do get the probe message, that is a good thing. Mailman keeps track of all the bounces that come back
to the server. Once an address has a certain number of bounces it will send the probe message. If that bounces,
mailman removes you from the list. If the probe message doesn't bounce, it keeps you on the list and resets
your bounce count.

Back in the age of the dinosaurs when I first started doing this all subscribe, unsubscribe and bounce processing
was done by me, on an individual basis. Later on there were 15,000 subscribers on Team.Net. I can't imagine
doing all the subscription management by hand these days. Oh, and if you introduce yourself to me at an event and
I don't recognize the name, don't feel slighted.  Do YOU remember 15,000 people by name?

While the bounce processing is nice, that doesn't mean I have nothing to do.  Currently there are over 17,000
messages waiting for the administrator ( That's me ) to inspect and do the appropriate thing. And you probably
might think I am stretching the truth if I told you how many unread messages are currently in my bradakis.com
inbox.

I need to write up a FAQ about stuff like this. RealSoonNow.

mjb, overpaid and underworked sys admin.