[Mailman-Users] Duplicate messages

Jon Carnes jonc at nc.rr.com
Fri Jul 18 11:54:49 CEST 2003


On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 16:46, Ed Wilts wrote:
> I'm trying to discover why mailman sent the same message multiple times
> to the same recipients.  I don't believe it happened to every recipient
> on my list, but as Murphy's Law would have it, some key people did get
> the message more than once - some got it at least 3 times.
> 
> The message really was only posted to the list once.
> 
> What can I look at to see why this happened, and to ensure that it
> doesn't happen again?   I'm running Mailman 2.0.13 on Red Hat Linux
> 7.0.
> 
> Thanks, 
>         .../Ed

The most common cause for duplicates is that the users are on multiple
lists (or sublists).  If the original list contains other sublists then
each sublist will get the message, and folks on both lists will get the
message twice.

Another less common cause is a resource problem on the Mail-server.  If
the message was very large and the amount of RAM on the Mail-server was
small, you might have run out of resources while processing the message.

A malformed or odd header on an email could also make earlier releases
of Mailman send out duplicates.  I haven't heard of that being a problem
in version 2.0.13 (which is very robust).

If you can look at the headers of the email that these folks got, it
will help you figure out what is going on.  If the headers are all
identical, then the mail was duplicated, and you should mark the time
when the message was processed and then check out the logs of your
server for that time period.

If the headers are not identical, then they should help you trace down
where the duplicates are coming from.

Good Luck - Jon Carnes






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