[Mailman-Users] We lost a message

[Joseph Brennan]

We had an odd situation yesterday where Mailman lost a message.

The list is one that includes other lists ("Other mailing lists on
this site whose members are included") rather than having its own
subscribers. The list has existed for several years and has been
used many times. The last previous time was a week earlier.

A message was sent to the list address, and held for moderator
approval, as configured. The moderator approved. The approval action
is logged, so we know the right button was used. But then the message
disappeared. No Mailman logs recorded an action after approval, and
Postfix had no log of the message.

As a test we changed it to include only one small list instead, sent a
message, and got the same result, that is, moderator approved the
message and again the last trace was the log that it was approved.

As a second test we made the list unmoderated, and sent a message.
Postfix log shows it being accepted and passed to Mailman, but there
is nothing in Mailman's logs for this one.

We checked carefully for any configuration that would discard messages
automatically.

We deleted the problem list, and created a new list of the same name
including the small list, and then it worked normally. To the best of
our knowledge only this one list had the problem. Many other lists
were sending mail successfully during the same time.

We can't figure out what happened here. We never saw this before and I
don't remember anyone reporting it on this list either. I realize that
by deleting the list we destroyed some possible evidence, but all the
logs are still intact. Two of our tech staff spent some time yesterday
looking for any place the messages could be without success. I keep
thinking we missed something.

Has anyone EVER seen this? Where would you look for clues?

Joseph Brennan
Columbia U I T