[Mailman-Developers] Debugging lost messages?

[Brad Knowles]

At 12:32 PM -0700 2005-10-10, Mark Sapiro wrote:

>  In a prior post, you indicate that IncomingRunner was detecting a
>  RejectMessage exception.

	Correct.

>  and presumably you were seeing that log message. Thus, we know it is a
>  'reject' and not a 'discard'.

	I am seeing some discards as well, but I've only seen them a 
couple of times, and I only saw them at the very beginning of this 
debugging process -- before I had added the additional information to 
the syslog output.

	I have seen other discards since, but only those two for that list.

>  Post is from a moderated member and the list's member_moderation_action
>  is reject.

	I confirmed that the list's member_moderation_action was to hold.

>  Post is from a non-member in reject_these_nonmembers and not in accept
>  or hold _these_nonmembers.

	There are only a couple of non-members listed in 
reject_these_nonmembers, and I don't think that either of them were 
involved.

>  Post is from a non-member not in *_these_nonmembers and
>  generic_nonmember_action is reject.

	For reasons I cannot comprehend, the generic_nonmember_action was 
indeed set to reject, which it should not have been.  I know that it 
used to be set to hold, because I was getting lots of notices about 
this message from a non-member being held, or that message, etc.... 
As they came up, I added them to the whitelist, so they wouldn't have 
to go through the moderation process again.

	I know I didn't change the setting for this list, so one of the 
other people on the project (and with access to the site admin 
password) must have.

>  There are different values for the error message, e, that can
>  distinguish the first case from the second two, but if this isn't
>  enough, I would add some information to the logging statement above.

	When I was trying to print the error message "e", I was getting 
errors sent to the console about bad formatting or somesuch.  I had 
to remove that in order to get Mailman to run correctly.

>  For example:
>
>                   syslog('vette', 'Message bounced, listname: %s, \
>  msgid: %s Subject: %s, Sender: %s, Error: %s',
>                          listname,
>                          msg.get('message-id', 'n/a'),
>                          msg.get('subject', 'no subject'),
>                          msg.get_sender(),
>                          e)

	This is definitely the sort of error message that I'd like to see 
get logged in Moderate.py.  Only I'd like to see this get logged for 
all three code paths, and without having to have the same code 
replicated three times.

	At the very least, if someone changes the 
generic_nonmember_action on me again, with this much information 
being syslogged, I should hopefully be able to detect this situation 
much earlier and be able to correct it much faster.

>  Also, in all these cases mlist.BounceMessage(msg, msgdata, e) should be
>  attempting to send a reject message to the poster. There should at
>  least be something in the smtp* logs about this.

	Ahh, that's another good idea.  Thanks again!

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.