Hi,
We have a new RH Linux/cPanel/WHM installation including Mailman.
I have moved several lists to Mailman from other servers. We have a very frustrating problem in that only a very members if the list are receiving email, the remainder being stuck in the Exim queue.
I assume this must be a common problem, and there is a fix for it?
I would be grateful to know what it is!
Very pleased with Mailman apart from that and look forward to using it for further lists once this one is solved.
Thanks.
Best regards,
Adrian Cooper.
Adrian Cooper wrote:
We have a new RH Linux/cPanel/WHM installation including Mailman.
See http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq06.011.htp
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Hello,
Thanks, but I have already asked on the cPanel forum, and no real answers.
This must affect every cPanel installation as it is a default install.
I assume not many people must be using Mailman :)
Any other suggestions for fixing this?
Thanks.
Regards,
Adrian.
Adrian Cooper wrote:
We have a new RH Linux/cPanel/WHM installation including Mailman.
See http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq06.011.htp
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
At 10:27 AM +0100 2004-10-29, Adrian Cooper wrote:
Thanks, but I have already asked on the cPanel forum, and no real answers.
This must affect every cPanel installation as it is a default install.
I assume not many people must be using Mailman :)
Any other suggestions for fixing this?
So far as I know, using Mailman and Exim together is not a particularly common configuration. Likewise, using Mailman and cPanel together is not a common configuration. Using the combination of the three may not be much less common than just two of the three, but it does have to further reduce the community somewhat.
If Exim is a common MTA for cPanel users, then you've got at least two of the three bases covered by talking to them, whereas we could potentially help with only the Mailman part, and then only with the bits that the cPanel folks haven't modified.
Alternatively, you can try asking on mailing lists or newsgroups oriented towards Exim. But I doubt that we're going to have much of anything else that we can do to help.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
Hi Brad,
Thanks ver much for your comments.
First of all, Mailman/Exim is a standard cPanel configuration that is used by almost all cPanel based hosting companies which is the majority.
There does seem to be a problem with Exim accepting the Mailman connection speed.
Question: can Mailman be configured to work with SendMail to send, and Exim to receive? I am sure that would solve the problem.
Thank you very much.
Best regards,
Adrian.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad Knowles" <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> To: "Adrian Cooper" <adrian@cooper.net> Cc: "Mark Sapiro" <msapiro@value.net>; <mailman-users@python.org> Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 10:38 AM Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mail stuck in Exim queue
At 10:27 AM +0100 2004-10-29, Adrian Cooper wrote:
Thanks, but I have already asked on the cPanel forum, and no real answers.
This must affect every cPanel installation as it is a default install.
I assume not many people must be using Mailman :)
Any other suggestions for fixing this?
So far as I know, using Mailman and Exim together is not a particularly common configuration. Likewise, using Mailman and cPanel together is not a common configuration. Using the combination of the three may not be much less common than just two of the three, but it does have to further reduce the community somewhat.
If Exim is a common MTA for cPanel users, then you've got at least two of the three bases covered by talking to them, whereas we could potentially help with only the Mailman part, and then only with the bits that the cPanel folks haven't modified.
Alternatively, you can try asking on mailing lists or newsgroups oriented towards Exim. But I doubt that we're going to have much of anything else that we can do to help.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
Hi John,
On 10/29/2004 16:20, "Adrian Cooper" <adrian@cooper.net> wrote:
There does seem to be a problem with Exim accepting the Mailman connection speed.
Not here, but CPanel isn't involved here.
cPanel is not really an issue since the O/S level installations are the same or similar.
The solution appears to be to restrict the number of concurrent connections between Mailman and Exim. I have added the relevant lines to the Mailman configuration but for some reason if I place the recommended line in Exim.conf, Exim will not start. The line is:
smtp_max_sessions_per_connection = 30
No one on the Exim list seem to know what the problem is with this.
This is the relevant information as documented in:
http://www.exim.org/howto/mailman21.html#basic
And it is nothing to do with cPanel:
By default Mailman will send up to 500 recipients on each message it injects into exim. However this is not necessarily a good configuration for exim since it will route all those recipients before starting deliveries to any of them. Additionally some ACL configurations have tests on the maximum number of recipients (which is a good reason for having a get out ACL for list traffic as described above) I would suggest setting Mailman to send a maximum of 5 to 50 recipients on a single mail (setting it lower decreases list latency, but increases the work that Mailman and exim have to do), and change it to send a maximum of 30 messages per SMTP connection. To reflect this you should also change the exim parameter smtp_accept_queue_per_connection to be 30 as well.
For example, add the following lines to ~mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py:
# Max recipients for each message SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 15 # Max messages sent in each SMTP connection SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION = 30
So the problem clearly exists according to both Exim and Mailman, and is not a cPanel thing.
Any suggestions would be most welcome!
Regards,
Adrian.
On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 12:57:39PM +0100, Adrian Cooper wrote:
The solution appears to be to restrict the number of concurrent connections between Mailman and Exim. I have added the relevant lines to the Mailman configuration but for some reason if I place the recommended line in Exim.conf, Exim will not start. The line is:
smtp_max_sessions_per_connection = 30
That is not a valid Exim option. You may be thinking of smtp_accept_queue_per_connection (which defaults to 10, and you may want to bump up to 30 if you set Mailman to use SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION = 30), with smtp_accept_max_per_connection setting the hard limit (but it defaults to 1000, which is far more than I feed Exim at a time from Mailman).
If you really are concerned about the number of *concurrent* connections, the Exim options you will want to tweak include smtp_accept_max and possibly smtp_accept_max_per_host.
None of these would leave messages around in the Exim queue indefinitely though... which I thought was your original complaint. You may want to adjust the frequency queue runners are started (either with -q or with another task) and the number of simultaneous queue runners (queue_run_max) if you have the I/O bandwidth to support it. I use many more than the default 5 queue runners in a typical installation.
This is the relevant information as documented in:
http://www.exim.org/howto/mailman21.html#basic
And it is nothing to do with cPanel:
By default Mailman will send up to 500 recipients on each message it injects into exim. However this is not necessarily a good configuration for exim since it will route all those recipients before starting deliveries to any of them. Additionally some ACL configurations have tests on the maximum number of recipients (which is a good reason for having a get out ACL for list traffic as described above) I would suggest setting Mailman to send a maximum of 5 to 50 recipients on a single mail (setting it lower decreases list latency, but increases the work that Mailman and exim have to do), and change it to send a maximum of 30 messages per SMTP connection. To reflect this you should also change the exim parameter smtp_accept_queue_per_connection to be 30 as well.
Note the name of the exim parameter it recommends. :-)
-- Jim Tittsler http://www.OnJapan.net/ GPG: 0x01159DB6 Python Starship http://Starship.Python.net/ Ringo MUG Tokyo http://www.ringo.net/rss.html
On 10/30/2004 4:57, "Adrian Cooper" <adrian@cooper.net> wrote:
Hi John,
On 10/29/2004 16:20, "Adrian Cooper" <adrian@cooper.net> wrote:
There does seem to be a problem with Exim accepting the Mailman connection speed.
Not here, but CPanel isn't involved here.
cPanel is not really an issue since the O/S level installations are the same or similar.
The solution appears to be to restrict the number of concurrent connections between Mailman and Exim. I have added the relevant lines to the Mailman configuration but for some reason if I place the recommended line in Exim.conf, Exim will not start. The line is:
smtp_max_sessions_per_connection = 30
Jim T. has provided the proper name for the Exim option in question, and other tuning possibilities. I can't think of anything to add.
Having never seen or touched a cpanel installation, I'm very reluctant to try to answer questions about them (that's more true on the Mailman side, where it appears Mailman is somewhat modified in those installations).
It's good to learn that you do have the access you need to make the adjustments that are desirable. Thanks.
--John
Hi John,
Having never seen or touched a cpanel installation, I'm very reluctant to try to answer questions about them (that's more true on the Mailman side, where it appears Mailman is somewhat modified in those installations).
It's good to learn that you do have the access you need to make the adjustments that are desirable. Thanks.
cPanel is incidental to this issue, although you would think by now, on version 9.7, they would have resolved it. Mailing lists on other cPanel accounts have the same issue for the same reasons.
I have now added the suggested statements to both the Mailman and Exim configuration files. This has partially resolved the problem, but a dozen messages are still remaining undelivered in the Exim queue.
Can Mailman be configured to use Sendmail to send and Exim to receive?
Thanks.
Best regards,
Adrian.
I have GNU Mailman List Management Guide v 2.0 but the Mailman I'm using is 2.1.5. I've searched the net but can find nothing more recent. Is the 2.0 Guide the most recent available?
Judy Petersen "Blessed are the young, for they will inherit the national debt." Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964), 31st US President
Judy Petersen wrote:
I have GNU Mailman List Management Guide v 2.0 but the Mailman I'm using is 2.1.5. I've searched the net but can find nothing more recent. Is the 2.0 Guide the most recent available?
That's the most recent version of that document. There is some more recent documentation. See http://www.list.org/docs.html
In particular, it notes:
The University of Washington has some very nice documentation on their installation of Mailman. It may be specific to UW's set up at times, but you might find it useful as a general help guide too.
and links to http://www.washington.edu/computing/mailman/
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Adrian Cooper wrote:
Can Mailman be configured to use Sendmail to send and Exim to receive?
Default Mailman uses SMTPDirect.py to send. This in turn uses the python smtplib to establish connection to SMTPHOST and SMTPPORT for sending. The defaults for these in Defaults.py are 'localhost' and 0 respectively. Port 0 tells smtplib to use its default which presumably is 25.
Thus if you set SMTPPORT in mm_cfg.py to some value other than 0 or 25 which won't conflict with other ports and set up Sendmail on localhost to listen on that port while leaving Exim as your incoming MTA on port 25, I think that would do it.
Or you could use Sendmail on a different host by setting SMTPHOST.
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Hi Mark,
Thus if you set SMTPPORT in mm_cfg.py to some value other than 0 or 25 which won't conflict with other ports and set up Sendmail on localhost to listen on that port while leaving Exim as your incoming MTA on port 25, I think that would do it.
Sendmail, as used by apps like PHPBB for example, doesn't use port 25 to relay the mail. Mail is injected directly into the Sendmail spool queue to be sent directly. That is why I asked the question; if Mailman could be configured to dump outgoing messages into the Sendmail spool, there would be no port 25 conflict issues. Exim could still manage the other aspects.
Regards,
Adrian.
Hi,
Sendmail, as used by apps like PHPBB for example, doesn't use port 25 to relay the mail. Mail is injected directly into the Sendmail spool queue to be sent directly. That is why I asked the question; if Mailman could be configured to dump outgoing messages into the Sendmail spool, there would
be
no port 25 conflict issues. Exim could still manage the other aspects.
To followup up on that, it would be necessary to configure Mailman to send to e.g.:
/usr/sbin/sendmail
instead of port 25.
Is this possible?
Best regards,
Adrian.
Adrian Cooper wrote:
Sendmail, as used by apps like PHPBB for example, doesn't use port 25 to relay the mail. Mail is injected directly into the Sendmail spool queue to be sent directly. That is why I asked the question; if Mailman could be configured to dump outgoing messages into the Sendmail spool, there would
be
no port 25 conflict issues. Exim could still manage the other aspects.
To followup up on that, it would be necessary to configure Mailman to send to e.g.:
/usr/sbin/sendmail
instead of port 25.
Is this possible?
See the assignment to DELIVERY_MODULE and the comments that precede it and the same for SENDMAIL_CMD in Defaults.py and be sure to read everything in Sendmail.py as well.
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 10/29/2004 2:38, "Brad Knowles" <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> wrote:
Alternatively, you can try asking on mailing lists or newsgroups oriented towards Exim. But I doubt that we're going to have much of anything else that we can do to help.
I don't attempt to answer cpanel type questions on the exim-users list, just as I don't attempt to answer them here. That's quite common on both lists (this question is already being pretty-much ignored over on the Exim list...there was a suggestion to check the Exim logs but I don't know if that's possible on a cpanel installation, and I did chime in to ask that).
If one has suitable access to the Exim machine, one can do exim -Mvl <exim-message-id> for a stuck message to see the log entries for that message (without regard to log rotations). [Mvl as in "view log"...Mvb for view body...Mvh for view headers] But I doubt that cpanel exports those.
--John
participants (6)
-
Adrian Cooper -
Brad Knowles -
Jim Tittsler -
John W. Baxter -
Judy Petersen -
Mark Sapiro