Error member gets when sending to one of my lists?
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Hi all,
A member is subscribed to two lists I run.
He can post to one but gets the following error when posting to the other list.
I don’t think I have things set differently for any of the lists I run.
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
550 Maximum line length exceeded (see RFC 5322 2.1.1).
TIA.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0fbcef57d028af495d8c9a5992405f78.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 2:46 PM Adam Morris <lists@damorris.com> wrote:
That error (550 - Permanent failure) is generated by your MTA (Postfix?, Exim4?) and you need to address it there. The message has not even hit Mailman by that time. It would be interesting to find out what in their MuA is causing this. Assuming your two lists are hosted on the same server, this is very strange.
-- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223 In an Internet failure case, the #1 suspect is a constant: DNS. "Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-) [How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 3/17/24 06:51, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
It could be generated by Mailman's LMTP runner. I.e., the MTA attempts delivery to Mailman via LMTP and Mailman's LMTP runner rejects the message and the MTA returns that rejection.
This issue <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1133> may be relevant.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0fbcef57d028af495d8c9a5992405f78.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 1:39 AM Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
Ah. I thought they were running MM2.
-- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223 In an Internet failure case, the #1 suspect is a constant: DNS. "Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-) [How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 3/18/24 00:55, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
Ah. I thought they were running MM2.
A very reasonable thought considering this is a Mailman 2 support list.
Also, as Steve points out, the error probably doesn't come from LMTP runner(aiosmtpd) which issues a different message.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e2371bef92eb40cd7c586e9f2cc75cd8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Mark Sapiro writes:
This issue <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1133> may be relevant.
qmail.org is currently contentless but still owned by Crynwr Software. So I would guess Russ Nelson[1] has retired from supporting qmail. If you're still using qmail I would migrate off it asap (free advice, worth what you paid for it).
Footnotes: [1] Once an old buddy of mine, but we haven't communicated in ~ 2 decades so .... But if he charges $200/hr, the service is worth twice that.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e2371bef92eb40cd7c586e9f2cc75cd8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Adam Morris writes:
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
The message should indicate which server rejected it.
This error depends on the message content (specifically, a physical line longer than 998 bytes, which he surely sees as a nicely formatted paragraph of normal-length lines). I can't imagine why it depends on the list, it's not hitting the list processing part. As Mark points out, it *could* be Mailman (more precisely, the imported 3rd party library aiosmtpd), but would be at the very mechnical "let's MOVE SOME BYTES!" stage of the process, not dependent on list settings at all. It's definitely a mail server error, not a list-related error.
550 Maximum line length exceeded (see RFC 5322 2.1.1).
It's very unlikely to be a recent (< 4yo) version of aiosmtpd, which issues a different error: "500 Line too long (see RFC5321 4.5.3.1.6)". Apple's Postfix also doesn't issue that message. Nor does Debian's Exim4. The citation to the Message Format RFC 5322 is odd, suggesting Microsoft or other commercial software (you *could* enforce RFC 5322 in a mail server, but no respectable free software does -- that's the MUA's job).
If this was your server (and not some intermediate gateway), there should be a log message for it. Do you have access to the MTA logs on your server?
So, it's possible but somewhat unlikely that the smtpds at the Mailman host are mishandling the email (doing this *right* *at scale* is hard). But it's also possible that the member's MUA is busted, and is using Content-Transfer-Encoding "8bit" (or worse, "7bit") where it should be using "binary", The difference between binary and 8bit is exactly passing control characters verbatim, and specifically allowing the message composing agent to ignore line-length restrictions. If you have access to the message that got rejected in "source" or "raw" form, you could check those things.
Also, some intermediate MTA may be busted and not requesting the 8BITMIME extension to SMTP, which is necessary to get some receivers to relax the line length limitation.
Steve
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0fbcef57d028af495d8c9a5992405f78.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 2:46 PM Adam Morris <lists@damorris.com> wrote:
That error (550 - Permanent failure) is generated by your MTA (Postfix?, Exim4?) and you need to address it there. The message has not even hit Mailman by that time. It would be interesting to find out what in their MuA is causing this. Assuming your two lists are hosted on the same server, this is very strange.
-- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223 In an Internet failure case, the #1 suspect is a constant: DNS. "Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-) [How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 3/17/24 06:51, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
It could be generated by Mailman's LMTP runner. I.e., the MTA attempts delivery to Mailman via LMTP and Mailman's LMTP runner rejects the message and the MTA returns that rejection.
This issue <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1133> may be relevant.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0fbcef57d028af495d8c9a5992405f78.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 1:39 AM Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
Ah. I thought they were running MM2.
-- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223 In an Internet failure case, the #1 suspect is a constant: DNS. "Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-) [How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 3/18/24 00:55, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
Ah. I thought they were running MM2.
A very reasonable thought considering this is a Mailman 2 support list.
Also, as Steve points out, the error probably doesn't come from LMTP runner(aiosmtpd) which issues a different message.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e2371bef92eb40cd7c586e9f2cc75cd8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Mark Sapiro writes:
This issue <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1133> may be relevant.
qmail.org is currently contentless but still owned by Crynwr Software. So I would guess Russ Nelson[1] has retired from supporting qmail. If you're still using qmail I would migrate off it asap (free advice, worth what you paid for it).
Footnotes: [1] Once an old buddy of mine, but we haven't communicated in ~ 2 decades so .... But if he charges $200/hr, the service is worth twice that.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e2371bef92eb40cd7c586e9f2cc75cd8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Adam Morris writes:
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
The message should indicate which server rejected it.
This error depends on the message content (specifically, a physical line longer than 998 bytes, which he surely sees as a nicely formatted paragraph of normal-length lines). I can't imagine why it depends on the list, it's not hitting the list processing part. As Mark points out, it *could* be Mailman (more precisely, the imported 3rd party library aiosmtpd), but would be at the very mechnical "let's MOVE SOME BYTES!" stage of the process, not dependent on list settings at all. It's definitely a mail server error, not a list-related error.
550 Maximum line length exceeded (see RFC 5322 2.1.1).
It's very unlikely to be a recent (< 4yo) version of aiosmtpd, which issues a different error: "500 Line too long (see RFC5321 4.5.3.1.6)". Apple's Postfix also doesn't issue that message. Nor does Debian's Exim4. The citation to the Message Format RFC 5322 is odd, suggesting Microsoft or other commercial software (you *could* enforce RFC 5322 in a mail server, but no respectable free software does -- that's the MUA's job).
If this was your server (and not some intermediate gateway), there should be a log message for it. Do you have access to the MTA logs on your server?
So, it's possible but somewhat unlikely that the smtpds at the Mailman host are mishandling the email (doing this *right* *at scale* is hard). But it's also possible that the member's MUA is busted, and is using Content-Transfer-Encoding "8bit" (or worse, "7bit") where it should be using "binary", The difference between binary and 8bit is exactly passing control characters verbatim, and specifically allowing the message composing agent to ignore line-length restrictions. If you have access to the message that got rejected in "source" or "raw" form, you could check those things.
Also, some intermediate MTA may be busted and not requesting the 8BITMIME extension to SMTP, which is necessary to get some receivers to relax the line length limitation.
Steve
participants (4)
-
Adam Morris
-
Mark Sapiro
-
Odhiambo Washington
-
Stephen J. Turnbull