I got a bounce notification, but bouncing it was correct because it was spam

Please do not bounce list mail (it is clearly marked as such). If you do not want to receive it, just drop it. We do appreciate suggestions for improvements to our spam filters (see below) and are well aware that there still is spam coming through. On the other hand, we have to be more careful to not incur too many false positives, so there is a very fine balance to take and your pet filtering mechanism might not work for us. As such, our appreciation for your mere expression of displeasure with our spam filtering might not justify the time you take to find wordings to convey your rage.

Why do you notify me about a single bounce?

The mails we send out are never unsolicited. You have signed up for them. So we notify you when a delivery goes wrong, for two reasons:

  1. to let you know that something is wrong on the way between us and your mail system.
  2. to let you know that you may be unsubscribed for bouncing.

But the mail you got a bounce for was spam!

Mail should never be bounced because of its content. Our mails are tagged with a 'Precedence: list' so if you decide to not receive mails for which you subscribed, drop them silently.

How can I get a list of all my subscriptions?

You can use the MajorSmart interface to get a list.

MajorSmart provides these commands:

send your commands to majordomo@lists.debian.org

I'm a Gmail user and don't get the messages back I send to a list

Gmail hides mails that look like they are from the Gmail user until there is a reply to it.

I suspect that a mail I sent has been caught by spam filtering

First check on https://lists.debian.org if the mail shows up there. If it does, the mail has been successfully distributed to the list.

If it doesn't show up then contact listmaster@lists.debian.org and provide as much information about the missing mail, especially information about

is extremely helpful.

I want to unsubscribe but I can't remember with which address I'm subscribed

Your mail address is coded in the Return-Path. Example:

Return-Path:<bounce-debian-devel=cord=debian.org@lists.debian.org>

Show full message header in Gmail

I have been unsubscribed from a list, because my mail system refused to accept list mail containing spam

It is bad behaviour to refuse incoming mail because of the content, because:

If you want to help us against spam, see the next chapter.

The lists are spam-laden, I want to help you

We run heavy filters on the lists, which reduces the incoming mail-amount of ~50000 mails/day down to 2500 mails/day of which 10-50 mails/day are spam (depending on new spam waves, which aren't known yet). On the other hand we have less than one False Positive per day. This is a pretty impressive outcome for a system carrying 180 Mailing lists of which 150 are unrestricted.

To filter we use procmail and spamassassin, so if you want to help us, you can send us recipes for those two systems to listmaster@lists.debian.org. You can also help us by bouncing (as in mutt) spam to report-listspam@lists.debian.org. (Don't automagically bounce spam to that address that your system thinks is spam. You are personally responsible that mail to that address IS spam. Also don't use that address to contact us.)

Our spamassassin configuration is also available.

I got an odd mail that send me here

lists.debian.org sends those mails automatically to notify users about problems with mail-delivery. Please see the other link provided in the mail, to find out what went wrong.

Will I be notified if I'm unsubscribed?

Yes, A Notification will be send out immediately when a forced unsubscription happens. There also will be a reminder after every seven days up to thirty days after the removal.

What is 'a certain threshold' after which forced removal happens?

That depends on your removal score and the traffic-rate of the certain list. As start value we begin with 80% bounces for unmoderated lists and 60% bounces for moderated lists. That value will be lowered depending on the count of forced removals in the last 90 days. The time range taken into account ranges from 1 day for high traffic lists over 1 week, 1 month up to 90 days for very-low-traffic-lists.