Mailman 3 November 2002 - Mailman-Users

Re: [Mailman-Users] Re: Troubleshooting: no mail goes out to lists - commonthings to check
by J C Lawrence Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002 11:42:37 -0500 jsingh <jsingh(a)fdu.edu> wrote: > I agree this was a great posting too. Then add it to the FAQ. > Is it alright to create a symbolic link in the usr/lib/ directory for > the sendmail binary ? Yes. Caveats: 1) You should determine why it wasn't there already. 2) You almost certainly want to deliver via SMTPDirect versus Sendmail. See Defaults.py and mm_cfg.py. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw(a)kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Prioritzing Addresses
by J C Lawrence Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002 12:02:20 -0500 Deborah Ng <dln(a)rogers.com> wrote: > Is there a way to set send priority either by list or by recipient, > i.e. if I have a large list of users, can I specify which addresses > that should always be at the top of the queue? What problem are you trying to solve? 1) Its very unlikely that you actually want to do this. 2) Even if you did manage to, it would have close to zero effect. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw(a)kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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Different templates.
by Jacek Wojaczynski Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

Hi! I have 3 lists and if I would like to send different initial message to the list when a new member is subscribed. Where should I put the appropirate files? One of the lists has it's FAQ and it would be nice send it to users who subscribe. So - simply - I don't always want the standard "welcome" message. I need it completely different for one the lists. I'm using mailman-2.0.13. -- kocurek

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can mailman...
by Woolley, Bryan Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

can mailman deliver html mail?

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Fwd: no mail out to lists
by peter schoch Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

Forwarded Mail received from: peter schoch

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Re: Troubleshooting: no mail goes out to lists - common things to check
by peter schoch Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

Jon, this was a great posting! I think it would probably be good to add to the FAQ page on the mailman site. I'd add that you might need to tweak sendmail's settings to allow some domains to forward to get this to work. All of your 'checks' were OK for me, and yet the lists were still not working. Then, on Friday, the lists just started sending. One of the subscribers had forgotten to remove their auto-reply "Out of Office" message. It replied multiple times to the subscription notices, and then the lists started and the auto-reply caused a huge number of posts! But now the lists have kept working. I have no errors, etc. in the logs. I have no idea of why it just started. I didn't change anything, modify anything... I'd feel better if I knew why, but... Tahnks for all of the help. Peter Schoch Here are some common things to check when no mail is going out from your lists. ====== I'm going to assume Sendmail as the MTA (its still the most commonly found - though postfix is gaining ground): 0) Check_perms. In all cases you should start by checking the permissions on the files that were setup: ~mailman/bin/check_perms 1) Cron. Make sure that the cron daemon is running ps -aux |grep cron |grep -v grep This will print out the process information about the cron daemon. If it returns a blank line, then cron is NOT running. 2) Aliases. To create a mailman list you ran "newlist" and it printed out four lines that you needed to copy to the /etc/aliases file (or wherever your MTA goes to find its aliases). Check that the aliases are in /etc/aliases: grep wrapper /etc/aliases Even if the aliases are there, you may still need to reset the aliases hash table so that it includes this new alias information: newaliases Here is a typical alias listing for a group called "sys": ## system mailing list sys: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post sys" sys-admin: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner sys" sys-request: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd sys" sys-owner: sys-admin 3) Smrsh. Check to see if your MTA uses smrsh. Red Hat as well as a few other distributions automatically setup Sendmail to use smrsh. Smrsh stops Sendmail from running a script or other program that is included in an alias. Mailman uses a program called "wrapper" to run all of its aliases (see the alias examples above): grep "smrsh" sendmal.cf If this comes up blank then Sendmail does not use smrsh; if not, then your server is probably running smrsh and you need to make sure that smrsh is setup to allow Mailman's wrapper program to run. Locate the smrsh directory and do an ls -l of that directory. On Red Hat: ls -l /etc/smrsh and the output should be similar to: wrapper -> /home/mailman/mail/wrapper 4) Interface. Some distributions in a noble "attempt" to limit the number of open relays on the internet, default Sendmail so that it listens to a limited number of interfaces. The default interface that Mailman list's use is localhost (127.0.0.1) - this is configurable in Mailman's mm_cfg.py file. To check Sendmail's configuration file: grep "Port" sendmail.cf This will list out the DeamonPortOption and indicate the interfaces it listens on (0.0.0.0 would mean all interfaces). You can also check out which interfaces your MTA is listening on by using: netstat -na |grep ":25 " 5) Qrunner. If you are running Mailman 3.0x then qrunner is run every minute via a cron job (that is why cron *must* be running for Mailman to work). Try running the program by hand. The exact syntax can be found in Mailman's cron jobs: su mailman crontab -l Here is an example of running qrunner by hand: su mailman /usr/bin/python -S /home/mailman/cron/qrunner If this generates any errors then send those to the list for diagnosis - or look at the last few lines of errors and search the list for key words from the error messages. 6) Locks. A errant lock file can stop a list from processing as Mailman waits for the lock to be removed. Since your list is not sending, we shall assume that no lock files should be on the list and that it is safe to delete any we find. ls -l ~mailman/locks The output will be something like: qrunner.lock.moya.trilug.org.22845 This indicates that process # 22845 created the lock. To look at this process and see what it is (if it still exists): ps aux |grep 22845 |grep -v grep 7) Logs. If you don't have any of the common problems above, then you should look for errors in your log files. First look for errors in your MTA log files. On Red Hat that would be in /var/log/maillog. Look in the log starting at the time you sent a test message. You should see your initial message come in and be passed onto to your Mailman list, afterwards you may see warnings or errors caused by Mailman trying to send out mail to the members of the list. Next look in Mailman's logs. The files are in ~mailman/logs/. There are several logs to look in for problems: error smtp-failure smtp vette config post Note: if you look in the qrunner log you will see several warnings about "Could not acquire qrunner lock", these are actually normal and are NOT a problem. Every line in the log files is dated so you should be able to isolate the place in the log files to start looking, based on when your problem started. 8) Qfiles. You may have a malformed email (or one that is simply too big) clogging up the flow of mail to your lists. Mail that is queued up by Mailman is stored in the directory: ~mailman/qfiles Move any files out of the directory and into a temporary directory, then send a new test message to your list. If that works, then you can move some of the old queued up files back and let those process. If it stops working again then you have a bad message in that batch - delete them or copy them to a different temporary directory. ====== Please feel free to critic and expand on this. I'm hoping that it proves useful as a starting point for folks having mail-flow problems. -- Jon Carnes

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Removing message(s) from List's Archives
by Ms. Akilah McIntyre Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

How can an admin remove message(s) from a list's archive? ************************************************************ Ms. Akilah McIntyre http://www.geocities.com/akilahm --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive medley & videos from Greatest Hits CD

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how to get around a mailman bug?
by Mary Ann Horton Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

There is a message in my queue that triggers a bug, and I can't get rid of it. It's a spam so I just want to discard or reject it, but I always get the same error. How can I clean it out? Is there a known fix? Thanks, Mary Ann Bug in Mailman version 1.1 We're sorry, we hit a bug! If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what happened. Thanks! Traceback: Traceback (innermost last): File "/home/mailman/scripts/driver", line 112, in run_main main() File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 112, in main HandleRequests(doc) File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 200, in HandleRequests list.HandleRequest(request, v, form[comment_key].value) File "/home/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 122, in HandleRequest self.HandlePostRequest(request_data[2:], value, comment) File "/home/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 167, in HandlePostRequest self.LogMsg("vette", note) File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 835, in LogMsg logf.write(msg % args + '\n') TypeError: not enough arguments for format string

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Switch from YahooGroups to Mailman?
by Carrie Cameron Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

Hi! I am thinking about moving one or more YahooGroups lists over to http://lists.uuyan.org/, which uses Mailman software. Can you tell me how to do this and what features I would be gaining/losing in the switch? Thank you. ===== Faithfully, (\o/) Carrie C. /_\ 425.775.6845 "May all beings be awake. May all beings be happy. May all beings be at peace." --Universal Prayer for the Welfare of All Beings __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos http://launch.yahoo.com/u2

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List mail vanishing
by Adrian Lester Nov. 12, 2002

Nov. 12, 2002

I appear to have a problem. All e-mail to all mailman lists on my server is vanishing. The web interface is still there, the /usr/local/mailman directories look fine to me, subscription and unsubscription notices (for (un)subscriptions performed through the web interface) get through OK. E-mail to the list, however, simply disappears. It neither goes out to subscribers nor appears in the archives. I presume that the mailman command is accepting the e-mail OK because postfix sends no error messages to the postmaster. This started apparrently randomly at some stage yesterday. If anyone can give advice I would be much obliged. Many thanks in advance, Adrian.

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