[Mailman-Users] mailing through the relay

[Richard Barrett]

On Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 04:35  pm, Konstantin Ovchinnikov wrote:

> Hello, all.
>
> I've installed Mailman 2.1.3 on RedHat 9 from the source, 
> web-interface is
> working normally, but mail is not delivered.
>
> The peculiarity of situation is that the host foo.bar.com, which runs 
> Mailman,
> as all the other hosts in bar.com deliver mail through the smart 
> relay. For
> security reasons we can't allow any host in our domain to deliver mail
> directly.
>
> Sendmail on foo.bar.com was up and running. When we say from this 
> host, for
> example:
> [root at foo.bar.com] # sendmail example at exaple.com
> ....
>
> Hello everybody
> ^D
>
> The mail is sent normally. We check example at example.com and get our 
> mail.
>
> We added the following into Mailman/mm_cfg.py:
> DELIVERY_MODULE = 'Sendmail'
> SENDMAIL_CMD = '/usr/sbin/sendmail'
>

You really do not want to use the Sendmail delivery module, that is why 
it is commented out in Defaults.py  with the following comment:

<quote>
# WARNING: Sendmail has security holes and should be avoided.  In fact, 
you
# must read the Mailman/Handlers/Sendmail.py file before it will work 
for
# you.
</quote>

You should tell Mailman to use SMTP to communicate with the outgoing 
MTA by saying

DELIVERY_MODULE = 'SMTPDirect'

Then, in mm_cfg.py, tell it to use the local sendmail instance, if that 
is set up correctly to use your main relay:

SMTPHOST = 'foo.bar.com'

or tell MM to send outgoing mail direct to the main relay server:

SMTPHOST  'relay.bar.com'

I prefer using the local SMTP server for various reasons but both 
should work if the local Sendmail instance is configured appropriately.

> For example, we try to subscribe through the web-interface. Mailman 
> wants to
> send us confirmation letter, but it does it DIRECTLY (not through 
> relay), and
> I don't know, what it does with Sendmail. So, Sendmail can't deliver 
> mail,
> Sendmail just queues it. If Mailman did what is written in 
> Mailman/Handlers/Sendmail.py:
> cmd = mm_cfg.SENDMAIL_CMD + ' -f ' + mlist.GetBouncesEmail() + ' '
>
> everything would work normally, but it DOES NOT!
>
> The second question is what we have to do when we change 
> Mailman/mm_cfg.py:
> nothing or we have to rerun config_list?
>

Run $prefix/bin/mailmancntrl restart if you are using MM 2.1.x

> -- 
> Kostya.
>
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Richard Barrett                               http://www.openinfo.co.uk