Jim Toth wrote:

> On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 01:17:51PM -0400,
> Valdis Kletnieks ([log in to unmask]) said:
>
>>On Sat, 01 May 2004 18:41:59 EDT, "Alexander J. Willman"
>><[log in to unmask]>  said:
>>
>>>SHOW CTR reports 2806453 recipients and 14794250 bounces received for April
>>>2004, which doesn't seem right.  How do messages to 2.8 million recipients
>>>generate 14.8 million bounces?
>>
>>Two possibilities:
>>
>>1) It's possible you have a recipient on a brain-dead system that
>>generates multiple bounce replies - I've seen systems that will send
>>back "unable to deliver, will retry" once an hour 168 times. ;)  Of
>>course, that shouldn't explain all the bounces you're seeing.
>>
>>2) Don't forget bounces generated by stuff that doesn't generate any
>>recipients, such as a bounced "Your message has been sent to the
>>list owner" for a spam posting.  Note that in *this* category, it's
>>quite possible that you get back several bounces for the notice...
>
>
> 3) Viruses are forging the list name in the "From" header and
> generating fake bounces.
>
> Since that I've getting delivery error reports for closed lists where
> nothing's been sent in months (only still has a .list file to keep the
> archives, there aren't even sendmail aliases any more), my vote's
> on (3) or a variant.
>
> --
> Jim Toth
> [log in to unmask]


All e-mail messages to my LISTSERV pass through Sendmail first, so I have
Sendmail logs of all messages (bounces and postings) that my LISTSERV
receives.  My Sendmail logs indicate that only 169487 messages were
delivered to my LISTSERV via lsv_amin during April.  This is consistent with
the other statistics that SHOW CTR reports, but not for the number of
bounces received.

Does anyone know specifically what LISTSERV is counting to get the "number
of bounces received" that SHOW CTR reports?  Is there a way to have LISTSERV
log more information, such that I could figure out where it's getting such a
high number of bounces from?  Thanks.

                Alex Willman