Understanding the flow of outgoing mails
I am trying to understand the Mailman mailflow and I am aware that stopping a mail from being distributed is not a trivial task. I've looked around and found this*) ,but it doesn't really explain the problem I am facing.
By accident, a list admin released a bunch of mail-replies to the list-address from people wanting to unsubscribe. The list contains 9000+ members.
To quickly work around the problem, I set a filter in Postfix rejecting all mails containing the particular subject and moved all outgoing mails from /var/spool/mailman/out to out.org, and thought I was home safe, but it seems that the list keeps putting mails with subject Unsubscribe in the out directory.
Does Mailman have another queue that I need to empty or filter out?
*) https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2014-September/077857.html
Henrik Rasmussen
On 10/14/2016 02:11 AM, Henrik Rasmussen wrote:
... it seems that the list keeps putting mails with subject Unsubscribe in the out directory.
Does Mailman have another queue that I need to empty or filter out?
So these are messages that were originally held (as administrivia or ?) and "approved" by a moderator.
When a message is held, the message itself is placed in a heldmsg-listname-nnn.ext file in mailman's data/ directory. (.ext is normally .pck unless mm_cfg.HOLD_MESSAGES_AS_PICKLES is set False in which case it is .txt). An entry is placed in the list's request.pck file which is the basis for the moderator listing in the admindb interface, and an entry is placed in the lists pending.pck file used to process 'confirm' actions.
When such a message is approved, the heldmsg file is removed, the message is marked in its metadata as approved and it is requeued in the in/ queue for processing by the rest of the pipeline. This and logging the approval in the vette log occur immediately, i.e. before the admindb page refreshes).
Thus, the approved message is either in the in/ queue or the out/ queue or it's been delivered to the MTA.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 10/14/2016 05:05 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote: So these are messages that were originally held (as administrivia or ?) and "approved" by a moderator.
Correct. Moderator mistake.
Regarding Mailman keep posting messages to the MTA despite the out directory had been emptied, it appeared that the qrunner was still active even after running mailmanctl stop (and mailmanctl -s stop). Killing the qrunner by kill -9 only spawned a new qrunner. I had to kill -9 the mailmanctl process too, to make Mailman stop posting mails to the MTA.
Problem solved. Now I just have to find the "Unsubscribe!" mails, before re-moving the others back into the out directory.
Thank you for the explaination.
Henrik
On 10/14/2016 08:39 AM, Henrik Rasmussen wrote:
Regarding Mailman keep posting messages to the MTA despite the out directory had been emptied, it appeared that the qrunner was still active even after running mailmanctl stop (and mailmanctl -s stop). Killing the qrunner by kill -9 only spawned a new qrunner. I had to kill -9 the mailmanctl process too, to make Mailman stop posting mails to the MTA.
That seems strange. 'mailmanctl stop' should stop all the idle qrunners. For the running qrunners, they won't stop until they finish processing the one currently processing message - the one named with a .bak extension, but they should stop after that one, even if there are others in the queue, and if you've removed .pck files from the queue, they should not return by themselves.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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