Re: Unsubscription Incident

[Slade Watkins]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 4:42 PM John 'Warthog9' Hawley
<warthog9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 10/27/21 12:34 PM, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> > On Mon, 25 Oct 2021 11:34:28 -0700 Shannon Nelson wrote:
> >>>> It happened to a bunch of people on gmail:
> >>>> https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/1fd8d0ac-ba8a-4836-59ab-0ed3b0321775@xxxxxxxxxxxx/t/#u
> >>> I can at least confirm that this didn't happen to me on my hosted
> >>> Gmail through Google Workspace. Could be wrong, but it seems isolated
> >>> to normal @gmail.com accounts.
> >>>
> >>> Best,
> >>>
> >>
> >> Alternatively, I can confirm that my pensando.io address through gmail
> >> was affected until I re-subscribed.
> >
> > Did it just work after re-subscribing again? Without cleaning the inbox?
> > John indicated off list that Gmail started returning errors related to
> > quota, no idea what that translates to in reality maybe they added some
> > heuristic on too many emails from one source?
>
> At least for the users I've had anyone mention to me (which for the
> record apparently this happened on the 11th, and people are only
> reaching out now about), the reasons for the unsubscribe was that the
> upstream servers were reporting that the users in question were over
> quota permanently.  We take that hinting at face value, and since the
> server is telling us (basically) that the user isn't going to be
> accepting mail anytime soon, we go ahead and unsubscribe them and clear
> the queue so that the users don't cause unnecessary back log.  Noting,
> this is an automated process that runs and deals with this that runs
> periodically.
>
> Also noting, that there's not a good way to notify individuals when this
> happens because, unsurprisingly, their email providers aren't accepting
> mail from us.
>
> If folks reach out to postmaster@ I'm more than happy to take a look at
> the 'why' something happened, and I'm happy to re-subscribe folks in the
> backend saving them the back and forth with majorodomo's command system.
>

John,
That's great.

>
> If I had to speculate, something glitched at gmail, a subset of users
> got an odd error code returned (which likely wasn't the correct error
> code for the situation, and noting the number of affected users is
> fairly small given the number of users from gmail that are subscribed).
>  Likely similar to when gmail had that big outage and it reported
> something way off base and as a result every gmail user got unsubscribed
> (and subsequently resubscribed in the backend by me when the outage was
> over).
>

Is there any way to detect if something like that affects Google
Workspace hosted inboxes too? Sounds like those in that group who were
affected were very few though but I thought I'd ask anyway.

>
> - John 'Warthog9' Hawley
>

Thanks,
             -slade