[Mailman-Users] Mailman and fault tolerance

[Brad Knowles]

> The outgoing message (containing a recipient list in its metadata) is
> placed in Mailman's 'out' queue where it is picked up by
> OutgoingRunner. At this point it is deleted from the out queue and
> exists only in memory. OutgoingRunner calls the DELIVERY_MODULE
> (normally SMTPDirect) to actually pass the message to the outgoing
> MTA. If the 'plug is pulled' on this process, the current SMTP
> transaction is lost as are the subsequent transactions on behalf of
> 'the rest' of the recipients.

Then this is a major bug in the way Mailman operates, and we need to fix
this.  Lock the file and make sure no other process tries to deliver that
message while you're working on it, but the file should not be deleted
until we get a confirmation that the MTA has accepted the message and has
taken responsibility for it.

Anything else would be a pretty serious violation of RFC 1123, for starters.