[Mailman-Users] Problem with Large Mailing List (431)

[Scott Courtney]

On Friday 14 June 2002 04:12 pm, Christopher Miles wrote:
>
> The group in question has around 500 members, which seems like kind of a
> lot to me. I¹ve noticed a lot of errors in the log file like this one:
>
> ---- snippety-snip
>
> Jun 14 14:50:41 alice courieresmtpd:
> error,relay=::ffff:127.0.0.1,from=<haitireport-admin at haitireborn.org>,to=<m
>a rthag at bestweb.net>: 431 Too many recipients.
>
> ---- snip-snippety

It may be that the person attempting to post is putting a bunch of CC:
recipients onto a post to the list. There is a configurable (per list)
parameter in Mailman to reject messages that have too many recipients in
the TO: and CC: lines (combined). This prevents massive cross-posting.
I'm not familiar with Courier SMTPD, but it is possible that the Mailman
wrapper is actually generating this message, not Courier itself.

It could also be that Courier is choking on the number of "RCPT TO:" lines
in the envelope headers from the list. You may need to adjust Courier's
parameters.

[...]
> The second problem I have it with using the same instance of Mailman for
> several domains. I was thinking that this would be easy, but I¹m having
> problems with the GID used to execute the mail scripts. When I compile, it
> seems like no matter how many GID¹s I list in the ³--with-mail-gid² switch,
> it only uses the first one. So if mail comes in for another domain, it
> can¹t exec the script.

This is "working as designed" per the installation documentation. The ability
to list multiple GIDs on the ./configure command is so that installations can
be automated on multi-host environments. It looks for each specified GID in
turn and uses the first one that actually exists on the system.

>
> Is there any way to get around this?
>

There are several approaches. Tell us how your virtual domains are mapped
to your login names (generically, not a specific list of logins). Is it one-
to-one or many-to-one?

Scott

-- 
-----------------------+------------------------------------------------------
Scott Courtney         | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them
courtney at 4th.com       | having a bad operating system."    -- Linus Torvalds
http://4th.com/        | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999)