[Mailman-Users] OutgoingRunner processes hanging

[Kevin Bowen]

>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.

Question: say there's a transaction in progress delivering a mail with
10,000 recipients, and you have SMTP_MAX_RCPTS set to say 100. If you
restart mailman in the middle of it (leaving the .bak file in place), will
it restart the entire transaction, re-sending to all 10,000 recipients, or
just the 100-recipient chunk it was working on at the time of the restart?

Also, in the performance tuning doc, it says that smaller settings for
SMTP_MAX_RCPTS are more performant (I believe it recommended 10), but if
you're sending a mail with a large attachment, doesn't a smaller value here
necessitate repeating the data segment of the mail more times?

Kevin Bowen
kevin.t.bowen at gmail.com <kevin at ucsd.edu>


On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 6:17 PM Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:

> 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
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