[Mailman-Users] Using a remote email account as a message source

[Patrick Bogen]

On 10/12/06, BigglesZX <biggleszx at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Patrick, and thank you very much for your reply.
>
> I've followed your advice and now have fetchmail retrieving mail from
> the remote account and forwarding it to the local mailing list
> address. Despite my setting the list to accept mail from
> non-subscribers etc, mail does not appear to be getting through - so
> I'm just wondering where there might exist logs of any mail
> transactions taking place, so I can attempt to debug this.
The 'post' log will indicate whether or not the message was received.
The vette log will show messages that were discarded (or held?), and
should indicate the reason.

> I have checked the files in /var/log/mailman, and
> /var/log/mailman/smtp shows a couple of lines like the following:
The error log generally only shows things that caused a message to be
shunted, which probably isn't the issue at this point.

>
> Oct 12 23:01:49 2006 (13491)
> <mailman.0.1160690507.13514.listname at mydomain.com> smtp to listname
> for 1 recips, completed in 0.345 seconds
>
> The strange thing is that the timestamp on this line is from about 30
> mins before I started sending test messages, so I don't know why it is
> there. Crucially, no lines have shown up since I started sending the
> tests. /var/log/mailman/error shows nothing relevant (just error
> messages from when I restarted mailman a while ago).
An earlier test message? Can you double-check that the system's clock
is correct?

> The messages are definitely being retrieved by fetchmail as I tested
> this by directing them to a different local address (a normal mail
> account). Is there any way I can get further diagnostic information
> from mailman? I tried enabling archiving and nothing shows up so it
> appears that the messages do not make it on to the list.
>

If you generate a mail from the machine running mailman destined for
one of the lists, does it go out?

My first guess would be that your MTA on the machine running mailman.
Double-check that your aliases are set correctly, and check your MTA
logs to see that the messages are, in fact, getting passed to mailman.

(Fetchmail *might* be configured to deliver messages directly to your
mailbox, rather than through the local SMTP. The latter is what you
want.)

P.S.,
Please include the list in your replies, in case someone else has
better ideas than me. This is an extremely likely situation.

-- 
- Patrick Bogen