[Mailman-Users] Disappearing email

[Ryan Rempel]

On 6/21/05, Paul Key <pkey at sgul.ac.uk> wrote:

> I have a one-way announcements list with about 2300 subscribers and a
> post to this list has completely disappeared.
> 
> The reply-to address of the sent email is changed to the email address
> of the person who has asked for the email to be sent out and this causes
> the mail to need approval even though the account used to send the email
> has been added to "List of non-member addresses whose postings should be
> automatically accepted.".  This is intermittent too - sometimes the
> email will go through without approval with a changed reply-to address -
> sometimes not.
> 
> However this email asked for approval - here are the entries from vette:
> 
> Jun 21 10:27:13 2005 (2762) Sgul-students post from lj005748 at sgul.ac.uk
> held, message-id=<42B7DE91.7060502 at sgul.ac.uk>: Post to moderated list
> Jun 21 10:29:09 2005 (2902) held message approved, message-id:
> <42B7DE91.7060502 at sgul.ac.uk>
> Jun 21 10:55:22 2005 (3013) Sgul-students post from lj005748 at sgul.ac.uk
> held, message-id=<42B7E52A.7000904 at sgul.ac.uk>: Post to moderated list
> Jun 21 10:57:04 2005 (3077) sgul-students: Discarded posting:
>     From: messages at sgul.ac.uk
>     Subject: Extension of Awards Deadline
>     Reason: No reason given
> 
> The first time it was sent it was approved but nobody received it and it
> didn't show in the POST log so it was sent again.  Again it was approved
> but then discarded - why?  The email appears in the list archive but
> using exim and eximon it was never sent out (doesn't show on the queue)
> but has disappeared without trace.
> 
> Does anyone know how I can find out what has happened to it?  or how to
> get the mail sent?

I had a similar problem recently which turned out to be a problem with
some changes I had made to the LDAP member adaptor (which I was using
for the list). The bug in my changes was such that there were some
circumstances in which the list thought it had no members -- if this
happened when the message was being processed, then Mailman would (of
course) send it to no one. However, the message did get included in
the list archive.

So that is one kind of possibility, though of course there are many
other reasons why this might happen.