[Mailman-Developers] debug logging, long CC (Deliverer.py)

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "PG" == Peter Gervai <grin@tolna.net> writes:

    PG> This reminds me to the feeling when I first met mailman, when
    PG> I thought: uhh, this program cannot log anything. I don't see
    PG> what happens. There is some logfiles, but apart from the error
    PG> log (which doesn't help always so well :)) there is no useful
    PG> logfile. Is there a log for all processed messages for
    PG> example? Especially the subscribe and confirmation messages?
    PG> The bounces mailman processes, and other non-fatal errors?

Lots of stuff should be getting logged, but I can't remember what's in 
1.0b6 (Ken?).  You should see every post getting logged,
subscribes/unsubscribes, digests, and of course errors.  The error
logging ought to be very helpful if you're trying to track down a
Mailman bug (but there are none any of *those* right?! :-).  I'm sure
there's more we could log though.

    PG> Maybe there is a possibility to have debug log but I didn't
    PG> find it. It was especially sad when I put a larger list to
    PG> mailman and found out that LOTS of mail did not get delivered,
    PG> and there were NO sign anywhere in the logs that 1) delivery
    PG> did not happen 2) why it did not happen.

You don't say what version of Mailman you're using.  There are a
couple of places that bugs can happen to prevent message delivery.  If 
it happens in the mail wrapper binary (e.g. you got your mail-gid
wrong), you'll need to enable syslog to catch those, since they don't
make it to Python yet.  If the error happens within the Python part of 
Mailman, you should see those in the error log.  Same with CGI.

The error logs (for CGI) should be quite complete; they should contain
the Python traceback pointing you right to the source line that
crapped out, along with a dump of the environment variables the CGI
script saw.

    PG> The other question is the reason why it didnt: it was because
    PG> mailman wanted to send a mail with a very long CC list, and
    PG> because security reasons the CC's were maxed at 15, so
    PG> delivery failed with 5xx error somewhere in the middle and
    PG> mail got silently lost. Is there any settings to set how many
    PG> CC's mailman will use at most? At least it should later be
    PG> documented somewhere that mailman requires such limitations
    PG> lifted.

Look in the Privacy Options.  There's an option that says "Ceiling on
acceptable number of recipients for a posting".  This defaults to 10.
BTW, if this is really why the messages are not being delivered, they
probably aren't just lost.  They get held for administrative approval
for a period of time.  Check the pending messages for the list.

Hope that helps,
-Barry