mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1261234@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Public bug reported:

Mahara has a VERP system to disable email addresses that have been
bouncing. "Bounces_min" and "Bounces_ratio", and it disables an email
when it has received more than "bounces_min" bounces and the ratio of
bounced messages to all messages sent is greater than bounces_ratio.

The thing is, these are *lifetime* numbers, and never get reset. This
poses some difficulties once a site has been around for a few years,
like mahara.org. We have some email addresses that have received
thousands of messages. So, if we set bounces_threshold to something like
the default "0.2" setting, then if one of those longtime addresses
become invalid, we would continue to send hundreds of messages to it
before we got around to disabling it. On the other hand, if we set
bounces_threshold to 0, then we have the problem that the bounce count
is cumulative and never gets reset. So, if we leave it at the default 5
emails, I could get disabled due to one bounce every three months over
the course of a year and a half.

Really, whether to disable someone's email should be based on how much
it has been bouncing *recently*. So what we should do is add a cron task
which sets the artefact_internal_profile_email.maillsent and
artefact_internal_profile_email.bouncecount columns back to 0
periodically.

** Affects: mahara
     Importance: Medium
     Assignee: Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1261234

Title:
  A cron task to periodically clear the VERP bounce counts

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  New

Bug description:
  Mahara has a VERP system to disable email addresses that have been
  bouncing. "Bounces_min" and "Bounces_ratio", and it disables an email
  when it has received more than "bounces_min" bounces and the ratio of
  bounced messages to all messages sent is greater than bounces_ratio.

  The thing is, these are *lifetime* numbers, and never get reset. This
  poses some difficulties once a site has been around for a few years,
  like mahara.org. We have some email addresses that have received
  thousands of messages. So, if we set bounces_threshold to something
  like the default "0.2" setting, then if one of those longtime
  addresses become invalid, we would continue to send hundreds of
  messages to it before we got around to disabling it. On the other
  hand, if we set bounces_threshold to 0, then we have the problem that
  the bounce count is cumulative and never gets reset. So, if we leave
  it at the default 5 emails, I could get disabled due to one bounce
  every three months over the course of a year and a half.

  Really, whether to disable someone's email should be based on how much
  it has been bouncing *recently*. So what we should do is add a cron
  task which sets the artefact_internal_profile_email.maillsent and
  artefact_internal_profile_email.bouncecount columns back to 0
  periodically.

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