[Mailman-Users] Mailman + Sendmail

[Rich West]

I did some further analysis and discovered that the messages (with the 
same message ID) were showing up in the "ps" output as processing "from 
queue".  Digging a little further, I tried killing off the sendmail 
processes that were processing those requests, and I saw the following 
appear in the mailman log:
Sep 12 20:53:28 2005 (24387) Low level smtp error: (4, 'Interrupted 
system call'), msgid: <43262183.3010301 at wesmo.com>

So.. that got me thinking that Mailman was somehow not ending the 
connection properly OR that my sendmail install really didn't like 
handling multiple messages in one stream (I'm blanking as to why).  With 
all of that in mind, I set :
SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION = 1
MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS = 0
SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 1

And things started working.  Odd..

Now, I know that this is definitely NOT ideal or optimal.. But, what 
could be going wrong?  I tried reducing the 
SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION to "0" for my tests, and the problem 
crept back.  I moved that back to 1, then set SMTP_MAX_RCPTS to "0", and 
the problem crept back.  Only the config above seemed to work..

My mind is a jumbled mess thinking about this, but if anyone has any 
ideas.. I'm all ears. :)

-Rich

>I've had mailman running for years and have only recently started having 
>some delivery problems with it.  I originally chalked it up to a 
>particular set of users within the one list that I am on (we host a 
>bunch of lists for others), but, after some investigation, I have been 
>unable to narrow down the source of the problem.
>
>Essentially, we have users A, B, C, and D.  A&B have accounts local to 
>the mailman/mail server and C&D have accounts elsewhere.  Now, when any 
>user emails to the list, mailman receives the message, then spawns off 4 
>(right now, I have "nodupes" deselected for everyone) messages in the 
>sendmail queue.
>
>If sendmail had just recently been started (aka: within the past 5 
>minutes), the message will go through just fine.
>
>However, in most cases, the messages (all with the same message ID) hang 
>in the queue forever.. or, at least, until sendmail gets restarted at 
>which time all of the messages get delivered.
>
>At this point, one would say "It's sendmail", as did I.  I dug, and dug, 
>but could not repeat the scenario without mailman in the loop.  I could 
>send email to each user directly, I could create an alias called 'test' 
>with each of the users in the alias, and then have any one of them mail 
>to "test" to have it successfully send that out to everyone.
>
>I looked in the logs on mailman, and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
>
>I'm pretty much at a loss as to where else to turn.  I tried deleting 
>the list and re-adding it, I tried deleting the list and creating one 
>under a different name.. I tried upgrading to Mailman 2.1.6.  So far, 
>everything is consistent.
>
>I was thinking of trying to set mailman to send only one message per 
>connection or something just to see if the other messages would process 
>and just leave the hanging ones out there (not sure how to set this, 
>though).
>
>I searched the archives, too, but didn't have much luck there as I was 
>not sure how to narrow down the search enough (I couldn't come up with 
>good search terms).
>
>Any ideas/help/pointers would be much appreciated!
>
>Thanks!
>-Rich
>