[Mailman-Users] Mailman and delivery of messages

[Mark Sapiro]

On 1/27/2012 8:21 AM, Mallory S Woods II wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> I have mailman version 2.1.9 installed in a shared environment. I
> don't have root access and I can't access the log files. My client
> has 5000 emails that I have successively imported all of the emails
> and have done my configuration on mailman. I added a gmail account to
> the list so that I could test to see if the message had gone through.
> Two days after I sent the message, I have not seen a sign that the
> gmail account received the email. There is no message in the spam
> folder of this account. I wanted to know if there was an easy way of
> determining if the message reached all of the members. As a side
> note, I did receive the email message to my account which is not a
> gmail account.


If you posted from the gmail account, you didn't see the message from
the list in your gmail account because of a gmail "feature" that
discards messages that "duplicate" messages in your "Sent mail" folder.
See the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/2IA9> for more about this.

As far as your original question is concerned, there is no easy way of
determining if the message reached all of the members. The ONLY way to
determine this is to contact each of the list members directly (in
person, by telephone, etc.) and ask them.

If you had access to Mailman's logs and the MTA logs on the server, you
could determine whether the message was accepted by the destination mail
exchange server for each recipient. In fact, if bounce processing is
enabled for the list, you could safely assume that each recipient's
message was delivered to an MX server if it didn't record a bounce.

If bounce processing is enabled and appropriately configured for the
list traffic, you can assume that recipients whose messages do bounce
will eventually get their delivery disabled and get removed from the list.

As for messages which do not bounce, see the FAQ at
<http://wiki.list.org/x/4oA9>.

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