[Mailman-Users] partial (silent) non-delivery

[David Lee]

We're new to mailman, which we are testing on our own departmental staff
list prior to wider roll-out at the univeristy.

System:
   Fedora Core 5
   Mailman 2.1.8 (RPM: mailman-2.1.8-0.FC5.1)
   sendmail 8.13.6 (RPM: sendmail-8.13.6-0.FC5.1)


On the test list for our staff (89 members), some of the emails are
failing, while others succeed.  On a failure email:
1. it only reaches 59 (out of 89) recipients;
2. it loses the hidden headers ("Received:" etc.) prior to the Mailman
   expansion;
3. Instead of:
      From: a.n.other at our.site
      Sender: ourlist-bounces at our.site
   we see just:
      From: ourlist-bounces at our.site
   (no sender; "From" replaced by expected "Sender" contents).
4. The sendmail log shows one of the names to get truncated (from
   "a.b.longname at our.site" to "a.b.lon at our.site".
5. The mailman log files (bounce,post,smtp,vette) don't show anything
   unusual at all.
6. In the body of one of the emails I noticed that what the user had
   typed as "===========" (a set of equals signs as a visual underliner)
   appeared as "=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D...", as though
   some MIME misunderstanding had occured.


We're stumped.

(When we tried re-sending a failed email, including in it a "Bcc:"
directly to me but still through the Mailman machine, it worked.)

A thought: The emails are emanating from Exchange 2003, Service Pack 2.
Might Exchange be generating something non-conformant (its bug) which
Mailman could then be tripping over (Mailman problem)?

Incidentally, one of the mail names on the list contains an apostrophe of
the form: Someone.O'Surname at our.site .  We have seen this sort of thing
cause trouble very occasionally on other email systems.  But if that
really were relevant, then I would expect it to be consistent for all the
mails to the list, not just some of them.

Any ideas?

-- 

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Senior Systems Programmer                Computer Centre       :
:                                           Durham University     :
:  http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/            South Road            :
:                                           Durham DH1 3LE        :
:  Phone: +44 191 334 2752                  U.K.                  :