[Mailman-Users] OutgoingRunner processes hanging

[Mark Sapiro]

On 11/14/19 5:51 PM, Kevin Bowen wrote:
> 
>> If the process is still actually delivering to the outgoing MTA, but
> slowly, this is an issue between Mailman and the MTA.
> Sometimes the process appears to still be delivering, but VERY slowly,
> other times it still has an open TCP connection but with no data appearing
> to be sent over it, other times it seems the connection has actually died
> (but the process still lives). I don't doubt that the MTA is to blame
> somehow, but I'm not sure how to go about recovering from it.


Almost always, these delays are due to lack of response from the MTA.
I.e., OutgoingRunner is waiting for a reply which has not been sent or
has somehow been lost. If the connection to the MTA is actually dropped,
OutgoingRunner *should* catch this.


> When it gets
> into this state often the only way I'm able to get mail flowing again is to
> shut down mailman, remove the .bak file from the out spool, and restart
> mailman, but this means I'm losing mail, correct?


Yes. You have two choices. Removing the .bak file means any recipients
not already delivered to the MTA will be lost. If you don't remove the
.bak file, it will be recovered and reprocessed when the runner is
restarted. In this case, any recipients that were delivered previously
will get duplicates. Also, if the issue is somehow due to the message,
it will probably recur upon reprocessing.

One thing you might want to try is setting

SMTPLIB_DEBUG_LEVEL = 1

in mm_cfg.py. This requires Python >= 2.4 (I hope by now everyone is
using 2.7) and will produce copious logging of all outgoing SMTP
transactions in Mailman's error log. This may help to understand the
underlying issue.

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