[Mailman-Users] Moderation notifications and Qmail

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 27 17:33:45 CEST 2011


Mike Manning writes:

 > We use Mailman 2.1 with Qmail and Plesk (v10.2). Everything works nicely 
 > with Mailman however it's not sending out the bounce emails

"Bounce" is a term of art; it means "mail returned because it was
undeliverable".  Mailman doesn't send out bounces to anybody, although
it may forward bounces it has received from MTAs to list owners.

The messages you are referring to are notifications of pending
moderation.

It's important to keep these separate because bounce processing is an
extremely important (and complex!) part of Mailman functionality, but
it is completely separate from the moderation queue.

 > to the owner to say there are pending requests. Upon checking the
 > /var/log/mailman/smtp-failure logs, it's showing that
 > website-owner at website.name doesn't exist when mailman tries to send
 > the bounce request to the list owner.

Evidently, Mailman has been configured to send to a non-existent
address.  (See the 2d and 3d items on the General Options page,
assuming Plesk hasn't mangled it.)  There is not enough information to
speculate on how this happened, but it's not a Mailman problem.

To solve it, somebody needs to get real addresses of the mailing list
owners, and either configure Mailman to send to them directly, or to
set up aliases to website-owner at website.name for them in qmail so the
that the pre-configured addresses work.  It's possible that Plesk
offers a front-end that is supposed to handle this in a convenient
way, but if that's failing, it's a Plesk problem.

 > It's like qmail isn't passing control to mailman when doing recipient 
 > verification?

Mailman doesn't, and can't, verify addresses; it can only ask qmail to
try to send to the addresses that admins and subscribers have
registered with it.


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