[Techtalk] mailman stopped mailing

[Terri Oda]

On Sep 14, 2004, at 10:34 AM, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> I have an odd situation. One of my announcement mailing lists is 
> refusing
> to accept email from an email address that I've always used. It's 
> silently
> discarding any incoming messages from me. I don't think I have anything
> different set since the last time I sent a message out to this group
> though. Everything appears to be set to "defer" or "hold" instead of
> "discard." It's a moderated list, but my email is set to /not/ be
> moderated, so my messages normally go straight through.
>
> Can anyone think of the settings that I should confirm? My other lists 
> are
> working fine, so it's not that mailman isn't started.

What do the mailman logs say?  What about your mailserver logs?  The 
incoming message should be logged somewhere if it's made it to the 
machine.

My first guess is that some sort of anti-spam measure is causing the 
problem, since that's often the problem when messages go randomly 
missing.  If there's no logs on the machine that indicate that the 
message made it to there, you should probably investigate this.

My next guess is that mailman is dying for some reason with something 
related to that list and only that list.  I've never seen it drop 
messages, but Linuxchix does have some weird issues with the queue if a 
spammer sends a particularly malformed message (What happens with us is 
that Mailman can't parse the headers of the message to send out the "X 
admin request waiting" notice.), and I've seen subscription requests go 
awry although I can't remember why anymore.  Often you can decipher the 
problem with this by looking through the error log for mailman.

The other thing to do is turn on the setting that sends admins a copy 
of the auto-discarded messages.  I suspect that this is something 
broken rather than a  normal behaviour, but if your mails are for some 
reason being auto-discarded as opposed to mis-handled, this will let 
you know.

So those are the things I'd check first.  In my experience, more than 
90% of the time a mail doesn't get through, it's because the mail never 
made it to the Mailman server (anti-spam rules, usually).  But that 
doesn't mean something weird couldn't be happening within Mailman.

  Terri