[Mailman-Users] Repeating mails

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "FJ" == Francis Jayakanth <franc at ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> writes:

    FJ> We are using mailman 2.0.3. on RH Linux 6.2 for the last six
    FJ> months without much of a problem. But yesterday after
    FJ> approving two messages we noticed that the same two messages
    FJ> were being broadcasted repeatedly. Even clearing the
    FJ> /home/mailman/qfiles dir. did not stop from the broadcasting
    FJ> of repeated mails. Finally we had to kill the sendmail
    FJ> process.

    FJ> i would like to know what causes the mailman to behave in such
    FJ> a way. Is it a bug or any configuration needs to be done on
    FJ> our part? Could somebody pl. clarify?

If you cleared the qfiles directory and you're /still/ getting
duplicates, then I suspect it's not a Mailman bug you're
encountering.

Do you have a copy of the offending message?  If so, check it for
embedded NUL bytes (i.e. ASCII 0).  It could be that Sendmail is
choking on such messages, triggering a bug that causes it to resend
the message.  You might be able to double check the culprit by looking
at the headers of the dup'd messages (do they have the same
Message-ID? The same Dates? etc.)

Mailman itself /should/ have no problem with messages containing NULs,
since Python itself is also doesn't treat embedded-NULs specially.
There has been some discussion about having Mailman strip out NULs
before passing them on to the MTA.  I thought at one point I had
addressed that issue, but now I can't find it in the code, so perhaps
not.

-Barry