[Mailman-Users] Counting messages that went to postfix queue

[Brad Knowles]

On 5/1/07, D G Teed wrote:

>  I've tried finding the message queue IDs which were used
>  and grep QueueID maillog | wc but this seems difficult
>  to do since some reappear again in the logs, which were initially
>  bounces.

Mailman will give you the message-id, the list name, and the number 
of recipients it was sent to.  However, this won't help you for 
digest recipients, since Mailman will have to generate a different 
and totally unique message-id for that.  In addition, it will use the 
same message-id on outbound as was used on inbound, so unless you 
have different copies of your MTA running on different ports and 
sending their logs to different locations, you're going to get a mix 
of both inbound and outbound activity in your log files.  This will 
make it more difficult to track down what happened when.

Now, postfix will give you a one-to-many mapping of the message-id 
and the queue-ids, and then you can track the status of the 
individual queue-ids.

>  I also tried pflogsumm and looked at those stats.  At first I thought
>  the message sizes and multiples of that message size going to
>  different domains would be a key, but it seems to be inaccurate.

Speaking as the author of the "mmdsr" script, and as someone who has 
hacked around with the pflogsumm script, I can tell you that this is 
a process that is harder to do than most people would give credit for.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I can give you any specific advice.  I've 
been looking at installing Splunk on the python.org machines so that 
we can more easily track down what happened when to which mail 
messages, but right now it doesn't appear to know anything about 
Mailman log format.  I don't mind teaching it about that kind of 
stuff, but that does mean that we're that much further away from 
having any kind of short-term solution for this problem.

>  I don't have any indications that anyone in our pilot list was lost,
>  but we just need a method to account for the reliability.

Mailman doesn't currently have much for you in this area.  We know 
that this is an area of weakness, and are planning on fixing this in 
upcoming versions.  However, we do not otherwise have a whole lot of 
details as to what will be going on when.

If you have specific requirements, I would urge you to join the 
discussions on this topic in the Mailman Wiki pages.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
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