[Mailman-Users] mailman and group mismatch error

[Mark Sapiro]

Greg White wrote:
>
>I am running Centos 5.3 with all of the updates.  I needed a mail list server so I installed mailman and postfix.  I did yum install postfix and yum install mailman.  postfix installed and can send email to my live account so it is working.  mailman is installed and I can goto my server and subscribe to a list.  I get the confirmation email from mailman.  However when I try to post I get a group mismatch error.
>
>I have done a google search and everyone says to recompile with the proper ./configure.  I installed from packages.  I would rather not have to recompile.  Everything seems to be ok except I can't post.
>
># /usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman
>Group mismatch error. Mailman expected the mail wrapper script to be executed
>as one of the following groups:
>[mail, postfix, mailman, nobody, daemon],
>but the system's mail server executed the mail script as group: "root".
>Try tweaking the mail server to run the script as one of these groups:
>[mail, postfix, mailman, nobody, daemon],
>or re-run configure providing the command line option:
>'--with-mail-gid=root'.


This only tells us that you ran the wrapper as root. It doesn't say how
Postfix ran it.

># /usr/lib/mailman/bin/check_perms -f
>No problems found
>
>So what did I do wrong?  And why isn't check_perms detecting the problem.  From what I read on the internet this is a very common problem.


Group mismatch errors have little to do with permissions and
check_perms can't really check them. See the FAQ at
<http://wiki.list.org/x/tYA9>.

The answer in your case is that Mailman's aliases need to be in an
aliases.db file whose owner's primary group is one of your above list
- normally 'mailman'. Note that this doesn't mean the file's group; it
means the primary group of the file's owner. This is a Postfix thing.

If you have Mailman/Postfix integration properly configured, this
should be automatic because the aliases will be in Mailman's
data/aliases* files and data/aliases.db will be owned by the Mailman
user.

Note that if this isn't all properly set up from the rpms, that is a
RedHat/CentOS packaging issue over which we have no control.

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