I am still struggling with this. I tried to add a shell for mailman in /etc/passwd. I am now able to su to mailman but I'm not sure that is the way it is supposed to be. I am doing this so I can manually run 'fetchmail' with the -v option. However, I now get a permissions error when fetchmail tries to create its pid file. It is in /usr/lib/mailman' and runs as user mailman. I am now confused by the permissions of that directory.

drwxr-xr-x. 13 root mailman 4096 Mar 22 05:09 ../mailman

 Is that correct? When I run perms_check it seems to think so. Is is safe to give group mailman r/w access to that directory? Is that something that changed from previous versions? I'm running 2.1.15-30.

On 3/20/2022 5:35 AM, Dennis Putnam wrote:

I don't know what happened but mailman is no longer working (CentOS 7). I don't think it is mailman per se but I don't know where else to turn for help. I am feeding mailman using fetchmail from gmail.com which has been working fine for eons. For some reason fetchmail no longer works as I get this error:

Old UID list from pop.gmail.com: <empty>

After considerable research I THINK I have traced the problem to the mailman account since fetchmail runs as mailman via cron. It appears that the crontab for mailman is gone and I cannot 'su - mailman' to run 'crontab' on 'crontab.in'. Although isn't that supposed to happen automatically? Nor can I run fetchmail as mailman. I get the error:

This account is currently not available.

The passwd file entry is:

 mailman:x:41:41:GNU Mailing List Manager:/usr/lib/mailman:/sbin/nologin

I think it has always been that way but I'm not sure since '/sbin/nologin' means there is no shell and is why I am getting that error. I don't, at this point, see how it could have ever worked. In any case I need some help figuring out why mailman is getting that error.

FWIW, if I run 'passwd -S mailman', I get this:

mailman NP 2022-03-19 -1 -1 -1 -1 (Empty password.)

TIA