[Mailman-Users] 2.1.5 fedora core 3 prevent mailbody problem

[Mark Sapiro]

Andy Heath wrote:

>Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>> Andy Heath wrote:
>> 
>>>they don't show as fails at all.  What appears to happen is
>>>mailman keeps trying to send the mail and succeeding
>>>but it keeps doing it again and again.  Meanwhile no
>>>mail leaves, it just sits in the spool dir.
>> 
>> 
>> What spool directory? The MTA's?
>
>No.  Fedora has its own ideas about where the components
>of mailman should live and its broken up all over and the
>code a tiny bit modified to facilitate that - some
>in /usr/lib, some in /var/lib, some in /var/spool, some
>in /etc.  Its a pain to work with.
>
>In /var/spool there is a mailman directory with these sub directories.
>I presumed they were normally in the /home/mailman
>
>archive  bounces  commands  in  news  out  retry  shunt  virgin
>
>They are not the usual sendmail queues, its before that
>stage.

Right. I understand that Red Hat is trying to be more standards
compliant in where they put things; thus the separation of things into
/var/lib/, /usr/lib/, /usr/spool/, but I would expect those mailman
queue directories to be in /var/spool/mailman/qfiles/ and I would tend
to refer to the directory as qfiles, not spool; thus, my confusion.


>> 
>>>The data directory fills up with .pck files and directories in
>>>the spool dir fill up with mail files.  I was testing with
>>>only one member, one administrator and one or two mails
>>>so the looping was obvious.  Some boundary condition is
>>>failing in the code.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> What is happening is the message is detected as spam and a notise is
>> sent to the listname-owner address with subject "%(listname)s post
>> from %(sender)s requires approval" with the appropriate substitutions
>> for %(listname)s and %(sender)s.
>> 
>> Since this subject matches .*[spam].*, the message to the owner is
>> identified as spam and the whole thing goes again.
>
>Not sure I understand you.  It doesn't get as far as the usual
>sendmail queues.  How does the subject get parsed twice ?


If I am correct here, what is happening is the 'approval' notice is
placed in the virgin queue with a destination of listname-owner at ... It
is then actually sent out and delivered right back to Mailman as a
message for "owner listname". This is how owner notification works in
general. In your case, when it comes back in to the owner address it
is processed through the pipeline of handlers defined in
OWNER_PIPELINE which normally contains SpamDetect as the first
handler. Thus, because of the overly generous regexp, the notice is
held as spam and the process repeats.

If you look in Mailman's 'smtp' log or the sendmail logs, I think
you'll see that there is an outgoing message per loop.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan