[Mailman-Users] Lists stop working

[Mark Sapiro]

bjames at cisco.com wrote:
>
>Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't believe it applies in our case.
>There are several hundred subscribers on each list, with over 200
>different mail domains (hence many different servers).
>
>A message from a newly added subscriber is accepted, logged in the
>archive, and distributed to all the members of the mailing list.
>
>A message from a existing subscriber is accepted, logged in the
>archive, confirming that it was seen and processed (at some level)
>by Mailman.  The message *is* distributed to the newly added members
>of the mailing list.  But it is not distributed to any of the existing
>members.


This makes no sense in terms of Mailman. Mailman builds the recipient
list for a message independently of where it came from except that the
sender only will be removed if the sender's 'not metoo' option is
selected.


>I do not have direct access to the list server system; I am working
>through our ISP's support service.  Any suggestions for what I can
>tell them to look for, in Mailman log files or queues or other places,
>to see why Mailman does not redistribute a message:
>
>    - from an existing subscriber
>    - to any existing subscriber
>
>but (as far as we can tell) is working correctly in all other permutations?


They should look in Mailman's smtp log for entries like

Apr 27 16:31:49 2007 (pid) <message-id> smtp for nnn recips, completed
in t.ttt seconds

to verify that nnn is the expected number, i.e. the number of regular
(non-digest) members with delivery enabled, possibly minus 1 for the
poster if the poster has 'not metoo' and possibly minus a very few
more if the post has direct To:, Cc:, Resent-To: or Resent-Cc:
recipients who are candidate recipients with the 'nodups' option
selected.

Also look in the smtp-failure log to see if there are any failed
recipients of the message.

Assuming this is OK, the problem is outbound of mailman. They should
check MTA logs to see that the message is received from Mailman It may
be received in more that one transaction with anywhere between 1 and
several hundred recipients per transaction depending on Mailman
settings, but they should add up to the number Mailman reports in the
smtp log.

Then only the MTA can say what it did with the message(s) after that.

If it should turn out that the smtp log verifies that mailman is not
sending from 'existing subscribers' to 'existing subscribers', i.e.
messages from existing subscribers have a small 'nnn recips' equal to
only 'new subscribers', then we can look at adding debugging logging
to the handlers that build the recips list.

BTW, what do you consider the 'current release' of Mailman?

Also, I just had a sudden thought. Do your list(s) have topics defined
and if not, did they ever?

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