[Mailman-Users] Problem solved: it was the MTA

[Todd]

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Elena Fraboschi wrote:
> ugh, you must be a developer... :-)

Not even close.  (I don't even play one on TV. :)

> My problem was that mailman received all fine, queued all fine,
> and never delivered a thing.  Obviously my sendmail was running.
> When I changed DELIVERY_MODULE from SMTPDirect to Sendmail,
> it worked just fine.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the sendmail daemon was running.
Changing DELIVERY_MODULE to Sendmail calls the sendmail binary directly so
it would work even if sendmail was running in daemon mode.

One way to tell if your MTA is listening for connections via SMTP is to use
telnet, something like this:

    $ telnet localhost 25

You should get something like this:

    Trying 127.0.0.1...
    Connected to localhost.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    220 localhost ESMTP Postfix

> So, my problem (one of my many problems :-)) is that, I suppose, I
> do not know what the hell is SMTPDirect, except that it is not something
> standard in Solaris 8, because I have the full distribution.

SMTPDirect isn't a program, it's a python module in mailman.  That's what
Sendmail is too, as used by the DELIVERY_MODULE setting.  Using SMTPDirect
tells mailman that it should try to deliver mail using the SMTP protocol.

> Now, might mailman work if I just put SMTP instead of SMTPDirect?
> Any comments?

Unless you write a python module called SMTP, it would not.

> As for all the warnings you cited, right, I read them.  I read them
> *after* I discovered what the problem was, which took me 24 hours...
> My only point is that I would not see anything wrong if the README
> file, the one we read when we install the thing, had said:
>
> "By the way, take a look at Defaults.py.  It may well be that your
> sistem does not use SMTPDirect bla bla bla."

Since SMTPDirect merely tells mailman to use SMTP, and it's assumed that
you're running an SMTP server (be it sendmail, postfix, exim, qmail, etc) it
should be unnecessary to add such a warning.

- -- 
Todd              OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
============================================================================
I always wanted to be a procrastinator, never got around to it.

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