[Mailman-Users] Looping Problem

[Paul Tomblin]

Quoting Nate Carlson (natecars at real-time.com):
> On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Matthew Frost wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 03:05:26PM -0500, Nate Carlson wrote:
> > > /var/log/maillog shows a bunch of addresses bouncing, the rest
> > > successfully delivered, and then mailman sends the queue request again.
> > > Could it be a problem related to how many addresses are bouncing? (There
> > > were 20-30)..
> > 
> > I've seen a similar thing, that happens when the local SMTP server
> > reports a temporary error (4xx code) for a subscribed email address...
> 
> Aha! I've got an address bouncing with 450 because the domain name no
> longer exists for one of my addresses. I need to wait a while before I
> can send another test, though.  :(   (This is a maintenence/etc announce 
> list for an ISP.. people get upset if I flood it with 'test' messages).
> 
> This is a pretty nasty bug, though.. is it an issue with Sendmail or with
> Mailman? Anyone know of a solution besides catching the list looping and
> looking through the mail logs?

Why is mailman doing this?  It seems to me that a Mail List Agent (MLA ==
mailman) should pass the mail off to the Mail Transport Agent (MTA ==
sendmail, postfix, etc) and never "think" about it again unless a bounce
is delivered back to the sender address.  Is sendmail returning an error
code on the initial call due to this delivery problem?  It probably
shouldn't be, or mailman should be ignoring those error codes unless it
can tell the difference between a delivery problem error code and other
sorts of errors.

-- 
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody
"Tech Services - We Aim To Please, We Shoot To Kill""
                -- H. Wade Minter, ASR