[Mailman-Users] Postfix won't recognise lists built by Mailman.

[Rod@freeserve]

Hi

I have had an installation of Mailman on RedHat with Sendmail for some year. It's worked really well - installed out of the box and made to work with very little pain. Worked so well I've never needed to post a message here before, although I've often browsed the archives from time to time. 

Now the installation has had to be moved to a fine new server with Postfix on Linux RHEL 5. It seems to work well for standard mail purposes. But I have been trying for several days to get it working with Mailman.

Originally the problem was with my setup of Mailman - Apache didn't like the Mailman installation at /usr/local/mailman so I moved it to /var/www/html/mailman ,  fiddled with file and folder permissions and eventually settled on using the cgi-gid user and the mailman group, and at last Apache was happy. I can set lists up, configure them through the web, and receive notifications about new lists.

But I cannot get a message through to the lists. Each list address returns "invalid user".

The problem in summary is that Postfix does not appear to recognise the Mailman list. Can anyone help or suggest areas where I should look?

Here's the detail.

I build a Mailman list called test, add an address to the mailing list, and manually add the relevant alias to /etc/postfix/aliases (and then run postalias), and finally send a message to the
list address.

The error response "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" comes in by email, and the Postfix mail log says:
----------
Dec  5 15:27:04 localhost postfix/pipe[3185]: 15373754FE: to=<test at AAAAAA.net>,
relay=maildrop, delay=0.07, delays=0.04/0/0/0.02, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (user unknown.
Command output: Invalid user specified. )
----------

The Mailman logs show no activity, i.e. the message has not been handled by Mailman. What seems to be happening is that Postfix is trying to deliver the message to a mailbox,
instead of to the command in the aliases file. There is no mailbox 'test' on this server.

Aliases contains this line:
----------
test:              "|/var/www/html/mailman/mail/mailman post test"
----------

I've 'set allow_mail_to_commands = alias' in Postfix's main.cf.

The question for Mailman experts who also know Postfix is - is this clearly a problem with my Postfix setup, or could the problem be that I have the wrong --with-mail-gid ?? If I had the mail-gid wrong, would this show up in the Mailman logs?

After painfully trying lots of systematic changes to the Postfix setup without success, all I can think of now is either I'm using the wrong --with-mail-gid or I need to move the Mailman aliases into a separate mm.aliases file (then run postalias and amend the Postfix main.cf to recognise this) and change the permissions on that. If neither of those work I really have no idea where to go next.

It's late here and I'm finishing for the day now. But if anyone has any input to point me in the right direction tomorrow I'd really appreciate it.

Rod