[Mailman-Developers] Excessive unsubscriptions

[Luke Hilton]

Hi All,

 

I am very new to Linux, but will tell you what I can.  I am trying to
diagnose a problem on a.

 

Linux Redhat server

Mailman version 2.1.4

Spamassassin 

Squirrelmail  

 

The particular mailing list has over 20,000 members.  The list is being sent
to on a on a monthly basis one way.

 

A mass mail (80k - html) was sent out to the 20,000 members approximately 2
weeks ago.  All seemed to go fine.  I was alerted that the server
performance had dropped dramatically so I checked the obvious and then
bounced it.  The following day I received approx. 3000 unsubscribe notices.
This is highly irregular as in the past only a few unsubscribe notices come
in per month.  I checked these entries in the Membership list and they are
still there, but the 'nomail' box is now checked and reason 'B' displayed. 

 

A colleague of mine restarted the server again yesterday and I have just
received another huge amount of unsubscribe notices again.

 

I followed the following faq yesterday in an attempt to diagnose.

 

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.014.htp>
&file=faq03.014.htp

 

1.      Permissions seemed fine
2.      Cron daemon was running
3.      Aliases are in /etc/aliases + did a 'newaliases'
4.      I checked the mailman/locks and there are a number of locks from
around the time the list was sent
5.      I checked to see if the processes are still around for the above
locks and they are
 
 
Should I delete the locks?  If so how do I do this safely?
Has anyone heard of this type of problem happening before?
 
I want to make sure there are no pending mailman tasks to complete and that
if another restart occurs I won't get bombarded by another wad of
unsubscribes.
 
I have a copy of the membership list and was thinking I could create 3 new
mailing lists and divide the 20000 people over the 4 lists.   Is this worth
it?  Should mailman be able to send 20,000 mails easily?
 
Any help with this would be fantastic.
 
Luke