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

[Mark Sapiro]

Patrick Bogen wrote:

>On 10/12/06, BigglesZX <biggleszx at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.


Actually, the 'post' log is written by SMTPDirect at message delivery
time as are the 'smtp' and 'smtp-failure' logs. Thus the 'post' log
doesn't log 'received' posts. It only logs posts that are sent to the
list. Nothing logs the initial receipt of a post.


>> 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.


The message-id indicates this is an internally generated Mailman
message. It could be a subscription confirmation or some kind of owner
notification. It is not a post.



>> The messages are definitely being retrieved by fetchmail as I tested
>> this by directing them to a different local address (a normal mail
>> account).


What is fetchmail doing with the messages it retrieves? Note that
possibly the most straightforward thing is to have fetchmail deliver
to a local mail directory (qfiles/maildir/ by default but can be
changed in mm_cfg.py by setting MAILDIR_DIR) and use Mailman's maildir
delivery by putting the following in mm_cfg.py

USE_MAILDIR = Yes
QRUNNERS.append(('MaildirRunner', 1))

See Defaults.py for more info.

>> 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.


You probably have to actually add log messages to the code, but before
going there, look in qfiles/in/ and qfiles/shunt/. If both of these
are empty, the messages most likely aren't getting to Mailman in the
first place.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan