[Mailman-Users] Emails not being sent

[Adam McGreggor]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 11:55:35AM -0400, Matt Smith wrote:
> I have several lists and nothing was changed but mailman simply does not
> seem to deliver messages.  I have been told that it takes a long time to
> deliver but my preliminary email test produced nothing in about 1 hour
> so far with no error email.

the long time could suggest some sort of greylisting.

> Where does a Mailman greenhorn start to track this issue down?

"Start at the beginning, and when you get to the end: stop."

Firstly, check your mail-client: are you sending to the right address.
Does it get through to the Mailman server's MTA? (check your mail
sending logs)

What's happening at the MTA level? (check those mail logs)

Is it passed over to Mailman? (check the mailman logs: post, vette,
smtp, smtp-error) Is Mailman running?

Check MTA logs to see where the Mailman mail's being sent to (assuming
your list has members).

Some of those should throw light on it; for doing those things, I find
it easiest to fire up a couple of xterms, arranged to one side of my
desk, with something like
    tail -f /var/log/exim/{main,reject}log  # to check sending
and
    tail -f /var/log/exim/{main,reject}log | grep amyl && \
    tail -f /var/log/mailman/{post,vette,smtp,smtp-error} | grep amyl
on the Mailman server.

Another thing to look at is to see what's in the list archive, if
archiving's enabled.

Those should get you going, you may also want to look at
<http://wiki.list.org/x/A4E9 >

-- 
``Sir Humphrey: The ship of state, Bernard, is the only ship
  that leaks from the top.