I have found an interesting feature of mailman regarding where it sends its SMTP mail to.

Background: The exim.org list handler failed over the weekend, helped by some abnormal web loads. A new (bigger) box was prepared and swapped in, all content was carried over, but the system refused to send mail.

I finally discovered that although the SmtpHost was set to localhost (which maps in the hosts file to 127.0.0.1), Mailman appeared to be attempting to connect to the IP address returned by a lookup on the current hostname - in this case the hostname was set to a temporary value during the rebuild and had no hosts or DNS A record. This caused all mail send out by mailman to fail.

The fix is to make sure that there is a mapping in your hosts file for the machine hostname as returned by hostname or uname.

Nigel.

-- [ - Opinions expressed are personal and may not be shared by VData - ] [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk ] [ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]