[Mailman-Users] Fwd: Mailing list lag to SOME users

[Kevin Carpenter]

On 8/19/2014 8:51 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Kevin Carpenter writes:
>
>   > We have documented cases of two users at the same company having
>   > dramatically different delivery times.  e.g.  for user1 at abc.com and
>   > user2 at abc.com:  user2 may get delivery in 5 seconds vs. user1 getting
>   > the delivery in 4 hours, inconsistently.  e.g. the next message may go
>   > through fine, or delay a different user.
>
> Sounds like greylisting to me.

Agreed, but my understanding of my greylist software is that it does it 
via mail address, and these are regular members of the list, not first 
time posters.  e.g.  They shouldn't be greylisted anymore.

>
>   > Lets try the headers a different way: http://puu.sh/aZpeO/cbef0bd773.png
>
> Your DNS may be problematic.  The PTR for the address of "mail" points
> to "spoe".  For most protocols, a CNAME is good enough, but SMTP wants
> the MX to have an A record, and many receiving hosts will look at the
> failure of mail --A--> x.y.z.w --PTR--> spoe to roundtrip mail --> mail
> and label that incoming connection as "possibly forged".  I don't know
> if anybody takes that very seriously these days, but you might want to
> change that PTR to point to "mail" rather than "spoe".  Be careful:
> that PTR may be there for a reason.  I don't think this has anything
> to do with the issue at hand, though.

Well, the good news is that I run my own DNS server as well.  And your 
right, the reason mail.seaplace.org has an A record is because of the MX 
issue.  I suppose I could make "spoe" a CNAME of mail, although the 
random nature of this problem also makes me think this isn't the problem.

>
> I guess amavis is configured to accept mail via LMTP on port 10024
> (lines 4, 7), and to inject mail via LMTP (thus the host is not
> identified beyond "unknown" in lines 5,8) on the default port.

I'd have to check, but that sounds right.

>
> Mailman appears to be the recipient at line 5, and reinjecting at line
> 6.  But line 6 is your external address for "spoe".
>
> The important information is between lines 5 and 6.  In mailman's logs
> (post, smtp, error, etc), check for Mailman activity on this post at
> 09:57, and also for SMTP activity.  Since Mailman is sending to your
> external address, if grey listing is active, it would show up here as
> two attempts to send, one at 09:57, and one later.  But it looks to me
> like your log analysis shows only successful attempts to send.

I looked in /var/log/messages, where almost everything goes, and didn't 
see anything flagged around 09:57.

>
> I would guess you can avoid greylisting by having Mailman send to
> localhost rather than "mail".  (This depends on how you have
> greylisting configured, if indeed that's the problem.)
>
> Of course this could be completely off-base, but that's my best guess
> based on the information you've provided.

I'll double check the amavis configuration, and greylist configuration, 
and see if there are any defaults I can set to mail.seaplace.org or 
localhost instead of letting it default to the local host name:  
spoe.seaplace.org.

One thing I noticed is that Amavis is being called twice.  That seemed 
really weird to me.

Thanks!

Kevin
>
>


---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.
http://www.avast.com