[Mailman-Users] Mailman is being a processor sponge.... very slow delivery...

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ecklund, Morgan writes:

 > Looks like we are receiving messages every 2 minutes or so from
 > people not on the and mailman is busy filtering those out (totally
 > my theory).
 > 
 > Sep 01 11:51:17 2014 (26561) -request/hold autoresponse discarded for: mailer-demon@"our symantec Brightmail Gateway"
 > Sep 01 11:51:17 2014 (26561) Mailman post from mailer-daemon@"our symantec Brightmail Gateway"  hed, message-id=<E1XOTgH-013p80-E0@"our symantec Brightmail Gateway" >: Post by non-member to a membrs-only list
 > Sep 01 11:53:49 2014 (26561) -request/hold autoresponse discarded for: mailer-demon@"our symantec Brightmail Gateway" 
 > Sep 01 11:53:49 2014 (26561) Mailman post from mailer-daemon@"our symantec Brightmail Gateway" hed, message-id=<E1XOTgH-00Jqig-A6@ "our symantec Brightmail Gateway ">: Post by non-member to a membrs-only list

It's the mailer-daemon trying post to the mailman at yoursite.tld list
(this is the site list that you have to have configured or Mailman
won't run).  It has been told that it can't post by the autoresponder,
so the autoresponder doesn't tell it again (the "autoresponse discarded").
You need to figure out why mailer-daemon is doing this, every 150
seconds or so.  (In fact, at first it was probably only a handful of
milliseconds between attempts to post.)

I suggest looking in the moderation queue for the Mailman list.  I
suppose this queue would appear in /var/lib/mailman/data.  It's
probably not a good idea to try to look at the moderation queue in the
webserver, use bin/show_qfiles on a couple instead.

 > Should the server be able to handle this?

If it were just spam every two minutes, yes, but I suspect you
probably have a huge queue of held messages for the mailman list
(where "huge" means thousands of files and many gigabytes worth), and
processing that queue is what is keeping Mailman so busy all the time.

 > How can I see what list these are being sent too?

It's there in the 2d and 4th log messages.

 > How can I stop them?

There's a configuration problem somewhere.  I suspect that the
contents of the held messages will help to understand what
mailer-daemon is trying to do.

Mark may have a better guess.

Steve