We are running mailman 2.1.9 on Solaris 10. This afternoon we had a strange problem that we have never seen before. The mailman aliases file located at /opt/mailman/data/aliases was somehow truncated and contained only a dozen of our 173 lists. Almost all of our list traffic was rejected with "User unknown in local recipient table" as a result. The problem was easily remedied by running the genaliases script.

I can find no reason for this one-time occurrence (I hope it was a one-time occurrence). I have checked the server and found no hardware or system errors. I have checked all the mailman logs and have found nothing that correlates to the date/time of when the problem started.

I have also spent some time googling this problem without finding much. Just wanted to run it by the list to see if anybody else has seen this. If it happens again I guess I could write a script to detect the problem and automatically run genaliases but I'd rather locate the source of the problem. Maybe it won't happen again.

-- Andy