Greetings.

This is a edited version of a post I sent to the developers this morning. No response, so I can only assume no one cares to respond.

I searched through my archives. I couldn't search through the list archives because the search engine on python.org appears to be broken(and yes, I followed the instructions, choosing only SIG archives.)

I found a bunch of posts related or similar to my problems, but not much in the way of resolutions or anthing that seemed to help me.

The setup we're running is Solaris, python 1.5.2, which I compiled myself. The list was working great, until people started loosing mail delivery. I thought the auto-bounce handler was removing people, but they're still listed as subscribed, and I never received a message from the bounce handler saying they would be removed.

Now, what I'm seeing in the logs:

in logs/smtp-failure:

smtp-failure:Aug 30 11:16:15 2000 (122) -1 <email addr> (ignore) (many, many times)

This user is in fact not getting email from either of the two lists he belongs to. The number in ()'s changes, though not with every entry in the logs.

and, in logs/post, I see constant entries about: Aug 30 04:53:08 2000 (23571) post to <listname> from <listname>-request@<hostname>, size=28501, 177 failures

(always the same number of failures and size; seems to be some sort of unrelated mail loop of some kind.)

and there are posts that go through:

Aug 30 04:44:42 2000 (23411) post to <listname> from , size=528, success

Qrunner seems to be working:

Aug 30 02:55:04 2000 (22304) qrunner begining Aug 30 02:55:09 2000 (22304) qrunner ended

(this is repeated every time qrunner is launched, which is wasteful in terms of space since it runs once a minute; I've got 56k of text for less than 12 hours of running)

Now, this mystery "177 failures" message shows up again: Aug 30 06:50:10 2000 (25068) All recipients refused: please run connect() first Aug 30 06:50:10 2000 (25068) smtp for 177 recips, completed in 2.620 seconds

In logs/bounce, I'm not sure I understand the meanings:

Aug 29 23:13:31 2000 (18077) <listname>: <someuser> - 27 more allowed over 426977 secs

then there will be:

Aug 29 23:13:33 2000 (18077) <listname>: <differentuser> - 0 more allowed over 395006 secs

The non-delivery problem affects digest and non-digest users. Archives are working fine. One list is 1,500 people; 500 normal, 1000 digest users; the other is about 100 people, mostly non-digest. We're using sendmail, and I have the threaded delivery turned on due to the large number of slow/bad mail servers(and experience has shown that splitting them up into chunks results in a dramatic improvement in delivery times.)

Some mail is getting by, and some users report that after re-subscribing, their problems have gone away, although I made some changes(like clearing out qfiles/ and also removing stale lockfiles) around the same time, so it's hard to tell.) However, several users are still not getting any mail no matter what I do(they do get the list welcome message when I re-subscribe them, however.)

Thanks all for any help/tips. I wouldn't mind applying some patches that have been introduced since 2.0b5 that will fix this stuff, if they're available.

Brett