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"Excessive bounces" when I'm not intentionally bouncing



I received the below warning, but am not knowingly bouncing anything. What might cause this?

- Have I set something up wrong?

I use Thunderbird, and have the junk settings set to mark junk as such but not move it anywhere (as this is a fairly new install: when it has adequately learned what I consider junk, I intend to tell it to move junk to my junk folder).

The spam filtering option in my email provider's web interface is set to off.

I keep very little on my provider's servers (so unlikely to be a lack-of-space issue), and am not aware of my provider having any recent technical problems.

- Is a spammer creating what look like bounces but are actually new spam?

Not sure if they would want to do this, or if they could do so well enough to fool a Debian listbot.

- Is my email provider bouncing spam even with filtering "off"?

Their documentation contains references to 'bouncing' spam [0], but is ambiguous as to whether this means a during-SMTP-transaction reject (OK?) or a later "returning to [apparent] sender" bounce (noooo!) [1].

(That particular documentation appears to be for business customers, as the settings page I have is the one documented at [2] which doesn't mention bouncing.)

--- If they are, what is a good way to ask them to stop?

Pointing them to https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ListMaster/FAQ is an obvious option, but are there better ones?

In particular, is there a risk that identifying the list operator as Debian, and hence potentially drawing their attention to the fact that Debian lists don't use what the wider world considers normal anti-spam measures (rejecting non-subscriber posts, and address hiding in public archives), might make the situation *worse*?

--- If they won't stop this, are there methods other than email to comply with "must subscribe" rules?

I already use the web interface for most of my Debian list reading, but I have a backport so I have to be subscribed to debian-backports [3].

[0] https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/guidelines-spam-control.html
[1] https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/organization-spam-control.html
[2] https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/anti-spam.html
[3] https://backports.debian.org/Contribute/

A bot wrote:
Your membership in the mailing list Pkg-opencl-devel has been disabled
due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated
21-Nov-2018.  You will not get any more messages from this list until
you re-enable your membership.  You will receive 3 more reminders like
this before your membership in the list is deleted.



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