Mailman 3 March 2026 - Mailman-Users

Re: Mailman v2 outbound DKIM?
by Macs R We April 11, 2026

April 11, 2026

> I thought I had won by setting the flag that encapsulates incoming > mail as an attachment before rebroadcasting it to the community. > I'm surprised that works for your users. When I introduced it, I > thought it would be the best way to handle it, and MUAs would quickly > learn to at least preview those when from a list, but in practice none > did. Worse, Apple Mail for iOS provided no way to get at it at all. > > Have you had complaints about needing to manually view the attachment? > My experience has been that the attachment is entirely transparent on iOS (amazingly so), and that Apple Mail may or may not show the attachment as direct text or an attachment block, which is easily clicked. My problem is that messages that recipients unwittingly never receive rarely generate any complaints at all, so my lack of complaints may actually be a bad sign. > Mailman won't do DKIM. This is really the MTA's responsibility. > That was my understanding as well... which led to much surprise when I inspected the headers of the (automatically-generated) messages I was receiving from it only to find no SPF or DKIM headings in them at all. Now, maybe this was because mine were purely intra-server transport (the only reason I was successfully receiving them in the first place), but I have thought of no way to capture and examine the copies of those messages that went out to remote users and got rejected. > The quickest way to get some protection is to figure out what the IP > address(es) of your outgoing SMTP gateway(s) is (are), and add an SPF > record specifying them as allowed to send mail for your site. Most > recipient sites will accept mail if the IP is allowed and the From > address is aligned per DMARC. > Well, sure, I was under the impression I had done all that. There is no cross-server activity going on at my end. The domain using mailman (firearmspolitics.info) is one of about eight subdomains on this host, which has ONE mail server and ONE IP address. The main server (server.wickenburg.us <http://server.wickenburg.us/> or wickenburg.us <http://wickenburg.us/>) and all its subdomains have SPF records, all identical except for an "include wickenburg.us <http://wickenburg.us/>" in firearmspolitics.info's, which I was told to add to help solve the original alignment problem with user-to-community message forwarding. mxtoolbox will happily display all the relevant records; they are the simplest forms of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records possible (given the overly baroque world of SPF/DKIM/DMARC). I think what helps complicate this is various hidden, unconfigurable cruft in the bowels of mailman... such as the fact that these automatic messages are being generated by "mailman-bounces(a)server.wickenburg.us <mailto:mailman-bounces@server.wickenburg.us>". This is no user I have defined -- had I defined it, I would have put it under firearmspolitics.info <http://firearmspolitics.info/>, not the unrelated main server name. I can't help but suspect this may be playing some part in my predicament. >

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mailman-loop sending mail to undesirable address
by Macs R We April 9, 2026

April 9, 2026

I tried posting this twice at the website and it appears to blackholed both times, don’t know whether it’s a new-user moderating thing or what. So apologies if this is a duplicate Hopefully, this is simple. I know nothing about the innards of Mailman -- I've been just using it as a black box for a decade and it's been working fine. Today, in the process of handling a subscriber's non-delivery complaint, I came across this error message in WHM's Mail Delivery Reports: From Address: mailman-loop(a)server.wickenburg.us Sender: Sent Time: Feb 22, 2025, 6:48:18 PM Sender Host: server.wickenburg.us Sender IP: 127.0.0.1 Authentication: unauthorized Spam Score: 0 Recipient: root(a)cloud-ci.unifiedlayer.com Delivered To: Delivery User: Delivery Domain: cloud-ci.unifiedlayer.com Router: reject Transport: **rejected** Out Time: Feb 22, 2025, 6:48:18 PM ID: 1tm16p-00000000BOG-aS00 Delivery Host: server.wickenburg.us Delivery IP: 127.0.0.1 Size: 0 bytes Result: The mail server could not deliver mail to root(a)cloud-ci.unifiedlayer.com. The account or domain may not exist, they may be blacklisted, or missing the proper dns entries. The recipient identified is not anything I ever set up. "unifiedlayer" belongs to my hosting provider, so this may be some sort of default or unset value. I've scoured the Mailman configuration screens for anything resembling this, or any field I should have provided but left blank, and I'm buffaloed. Where is Mailman getting this value from, and how to I change it to something more useful?

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nodupes set with reply-to yet member does not get the message
by Brian McCarthy March 23, 2026

March 23, 2026

Trying to sort out something from a long-standing mailing list. Its running under cpanel (sometimes that matters). A member sends out a message with Reply-to set back to her sending address. She never gets the message back at her email. Checking the whm mail logs it shows it was delivered to her outlook email address successfully. Thoughts on why she isn't getting the message? I thought it was the 'nodupes' setting so I turned it off for everyone on the list. Every member has 'hide' on, and 'ack', 'not metoo', 'nodups' and 'digest' turned off Is it Outlook? Is it Mailman? Thanks

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A bit off-topic, replacing .forward
by Jayson Smith March 7, 2026

March 7, 2026

Hi, For years I've had some addresses on a domain I host that forward to certain other external addresses. I administer the server for an organization of writers with disabilities. All example addresses here are fictitious. Let's say I want an Email address committee(a)my.domain so people can write to a certain committee. It needs to be able to accept Email from anyone, and forward those Emails to, let's say, committee.member(a)gmail.com, another.member(a)hotmail.com, some.other.member(a)comcast.net, and yet.another.member(a)yahoo.com. The obvious answer is to put a .forward file in committee's home directory that points to those addresses. However, this doesn't seem to be working near as well as it once did. Of course one vulnerability is that if the committee address is required to be posted on the web, or even exposed through a sender's address book getting compromised, spammers can send any Email they want to that address and my server will happily forward it along. To mitigate this, what I've been doing is to set up a second Email address called committeefwd which no one needs to even know about. Then when a desirable (not spam) Email comes to committee, I use the Mutt Email client's Bounce feature to send it to committeefwd, which does the actual forwarding. The problem is that it seems Gmail especially doesn't like this. I assume they're seeing incoming Emails which still have lots of evidence of having been sent from the original sender's domain (DKIM signatures, headers, etc.), yet something seems funny about them, because of course it does! As a test, I sent an Email to myself from a Hotmail account, then manually forwarded it to a local account which forwards to a Gmail account. The message ended up in spam on Gmail. It seems to me that what is needed here is something that can take an incoming message, make it look like a new message from my server, then send it to the destination addresses. At first I thought Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) might be the answer, but that would still leave lots of funny-tasting stuff in the message in terms of headers from the original sending domain, etc. I'm surprised someone hasn't written a program to do this. I'm sure Mailman could be used (abused?) to do this, but this seems to me like overkill. Note that I could get the desired effect by using an Email client's forward function to forward the message to the secret forwarding address, but this has a few disadvantages. First, it adds unneeded clutter to the message as received by the final recipients. Second, they can't then just hit Reply in order to reply to the original sender, as I assume any reply sent that way would come back to the address that forwarded the message, not the original sender. I hope I've explained this well enough so you can see the problem. Any thoughts? Thanks, Jayson

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corrupt mailman? after a disk loss.
by Steven Jones March 4, 2026

March 4, 2026

Website is returning "Bug in Mailman version 2.1.30 We're sorry, we hit a bug! Please inform the webmaster for this site of this problem. Printing of traceback and other system information has been explicitly inhibited, but the webmaster can find this information in the Mailman error logs or the web server logs." I did a reboot no joy. And "no such file or directory: '/var/lib/mailman/its-alerts/config.db.last" Emails every 5mins. Errors log, 8><--------- Mar 05 09:15:32 2026 (2496) Dequeuing message destined for missing list: its-alerts Mar 05 09:16:32 2026 (2496) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.pck Mar 05 09:16:32 2026 (2496) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.pck.last Mar 05 09:16:32 2026 (2496) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db' Mar 05 09:16:32 2026 (2496) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db.last [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db.last' Mar 05 09:16:32 2026 (2496) All its-alerts fallbacks were corrupt, giving up Mar 05 09:16:32 2026 (2496) error opening list: its-alerts [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db.last' Mar 05 09:16:32 2026 (2496) Dequeuing message destined for missing list: its-alerts Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 (7441) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.pck Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 (7441) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.pck.last Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 (7441) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db' Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 (7441) couldn't load config file /var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db.last [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db.last' Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 (7441) All its-alerts fallbacks were corrupt, giving up Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): Traceback (most recent call last): Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 293, in <module> Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): main() Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 273, in main Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): process_lists(lock) Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 205, in process_lists Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): mlist = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=0) Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 133, in __init__ Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): self.Load() Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 709, in Load Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): raise Errors.MMCorruptListDatabaseError, e Mar 05 09:20:02 2026 gate_news(7441): Mailman.Errors . MMCorruptListDatabaseError : [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/lib/mailman/lists/its-alerts/config.db.last' 8><----- Googling tells me nothing so far. regards Steven

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Mailman v2 outbound DKIM?
by Macs R We March 2, 2026

March 2, 2026

I use the v2 mailman that is supplied with cPanel (currently 2.2.0.16-2). Early last year, I struggled getting it to work properly (instead of fail silently) as more and more recipient servers (especially the big boys) demanded DKIM/SPF alignment. I thought I had won by setting the flag that encapsulates incoming mail as an attachment before rebroadcasting it to the community. What I didn't realize was that I still had a problem with mail initiated BY mailman -- for example, the automatic monthly "here is your password" reminder. There doesn't appear to be any DKIM information in it at all, and I can't find an option that might let me tell it to add some. I as the admin get the mail successfully (being on the same server as mailman), but I can see in the Mail Delivery Reports that (mostly) everyone offsite simply fails. I've attached an example message from that log. Is there any way to make mailman insert DKIM information inside mail it generates, and if so, how? Thank you.

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