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

[Brad Knowles]

On 5/2/07, D G Teed wrote:

>  I didn't trust that findsender.pl actually parses postfix logs 100% so
>  I verified with plain grep for any mention of the user addresses in
>  /var/log/maillog or
>  /var/log/mailman/*    I found one reference of the 28 which
>  findsender.pl missed.
>  This list has 1890 members, and 27 are not showing up at all in postfix
>  logs.

Keep in mind that some of those users may have set themselves (or 
been set) to "NOMAIL" status, or they may be digest subscribers.  In 
either of those cases, they would not be found in the list of normal 
recipients.

You have to look to make sure you know how many "normal" subscribers you have.

>  Unless postfix has a bug where some emails are not being logged, there
>  seems to be a problem with mailman.  I'm not looking for delivery - just
>  any reference to the expected attempts to deliver.

If you found a bug, I think it's much more likely that it exists 
within Mailman or the Python libraries or Python itself than postfix. 
Or you could have found a bug in syslog, where postfix sent the data 
to be logged, but syslog didn't actually write it to the file.

>  There are no errors like it in our previous months of using mailman
>  on other smaller departmental mailing lists.  The mailman smtp log does
>  not show the entry for the 1800 something messages which were delivered OK.

That's weird.  You should definitely see Mailman smtp log entries for 
the other messages which were delivered.

>  My hunch, is that there is some bad data in our mailing list subscription
>  which wasn't caught anywhere and has created this issue.  We are given
>  data from the Alumni Affairs department to inject into the mailing list.
>  It may contain odd things.  I've seen a '#' and single quote appear in
>  the mail subscriptions.

That's possible.  I think you can use dumpdb to take a look at the 
list of subscribers, to see if there's anything funky there.

However, given that you've not had problems before and are now having 
problems, tells me that either this is a result of a new addition to 
the list, or that maybe there was a problem with the way that 
particular message was formatted.


Remind me again -- what version of Mailman are you using?  If you're 
not already on 2.1.9, you might want to consider making that upgrade, 
because I know that the more recent code has gotten more robust in 
the face of weirdness on input, and continuing to operate as close to 
normal as possible even though there may be some messages which don't 
go through.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>

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