[Mailman-Users] weird mailman error (delivery failures)

[Klaus Steden]

Hi,

We run a number of mailing lists here with Mailman; the MTA/MUA combination is
sendmail 8.9.3/procmail 3.14.

For two, (and presumably all) of our mailing lists, the following behaviour
has started occurring, or at least, is starting to be noticed.

Someone is trying to circulate a jpeg file, about 150 KB, to one of the
mailing lists; the list is 200+ people. It shows up in the mail queue; it
shows up in the mailman archives; it never gets delivered. There is no maximum
message size for either Mailman or procmail, and the size limit for sendmail
is an order of magnitude larger. I can see the message on disk in mailman's
data directory while 'deliver' and 'contact_transport' are running; there are
no errors reported in the 'error' log, although SMTP failures show up (not
consistently) in the 'smtp-failures' file - timeouts - but again, these aren't
consistent.

I'm not seeing any failure notification from sendmail; procmail never logs the
message delivery attempt (presumably, that never happens). The message can't
have just disappeared into the ether. Has anyone seen this before? Does anyone
have any helpful hints/tips/tricks/answers/advice? I'm stumped.

fwiw, it's a FreeBSD system (with the POSIX fcntl patch for Python) running
Mailman 1.0.

desperate,
Klaus