[Mailman-Users] Is it OK to unshunt "bad" messages?

[Mark Sapiro]

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Sebastian Hagedorn wrote:
|
| I just noticed a message in the "bad" directory. I looked at it with
| show_qfiles and it looked harmless. Probably it was broken WRT its MIME
| encoding, but it wasn't a virus or anything. On a whim I ran unshunt on
| the "bad" directory and the message was then delivered to the list.
|
| Basically I'm curious why Mailman didn't consider the message "bad" that
| time around. Is unshunt-processing somehow different from normal
| processing?


I'm guessing that you are running Mailman 2.1.10 with the patch from
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-April/061360.html>,
since there's little else these days that would put anything in the
'bad' queue. Did the file have a .psv extension?

You should really look in the 'error' log to see the message associated
with preserving the entry. It may have been an actual unparseable
message due to defective MIME structure, or some possibly transient
issue. In the first case, I'd expect the same error to occur upon
unshunting, but not necessarily in the second case. There is nothing
really in bin/unshunt that would make it succeed without correcting the
underlying problem.

The main problem with unshunting a message from the 'bad' queue (other
than having to change the extension from .psv to .pck or .bak) is that
true shunted messages have an item in the metadata indicating the
original queue. Preserved messages in the 'bad' queue don't have this,
so they will be unshunted to the 'in' queue by default, which may not be
correct - e.g. they may have come from the bounce queue.

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

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